


Meditations in an Emergency

by Asimiento



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-09 22:13:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7819234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asimiento/pseuds/Asimiento
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life contracts and death is expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Some other sign that people do not totally regret life

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Frank O'Hara, as do several other themes, images, and lines incorporated into the text.
> 
> What you're about to read is a highly indulgent escapist mess.

The notice arrives on a Monday. A single sealed white envelope, right in the middle of his desk. It is immediately curious for three salient reasons: one, snail mail is a rarity in the electronic landscape of Menlo Park and Palo Alto; two, it’s addressed to his real name, which nobody has called him for about four years now; three, no part of the stationery contains any details with regards to the sender, just his business address. The sheet inside the envelope is a thick and weighty card stock, with five lines of text writ in large calligraphic loops that seem to swim around the page as if to nauseate,deliberately. His eyes dart from top to bottom, again and again, just to make sure he’s read it all correctly. 

 

_To Mr. Donald Dunn_ :

_You are hereby notified of the expiry of your tenancy on this Earth. Your eviction has been scheduled, ten years to the date: March 24, 2024._

_Please be advised that the nature of your expiry will remain confidential. Please be advised as well that you will henceforth receive dispatches in all future addresses, fortnightly._

_It should be noted that it would be best to keep the nature of this — and all future notices — strictly confidential._

_Sending you our warmest regards and sincerest condolences._

 

The sheet is signed with a letterpress seal of two wheels interlocked with an eye in the middle. He considers reporting to HR, but decides it’s harmless. As far as pranks go, he appreciates the tasteful packaging of it, even if the joke itself is a little disturbing. The notice ends up tucked in the top tier of his shelf, sandwiched in between a dogeared paperback of _Always Coming Home_  and a row of clear plastic binders. The week passes as most weeks usually do. 

He operates on a strict routine, excessively detailed, scrupulously, neurotically, unshakably — from carefully ironed button-downs to cautiously-worded rhetoric — a set of disparate finer details, all the quirks packed into flat blocks stacked criss-cross into the ostensibly secure Jenga tower of all that he is. Functional, efficient, aesthetically benign. The notice is still there in the back of his head, but it’s pressed down with other petty fears, like an off-color comment in a business meeting, some logistical slip-up from last week's onboarding period coming back to bite him in the ass, or that he might have just signed on tech that does absolutely nothing. ( _To be fair, six of them had, and they were all following Gavin’s lead, because isn’t that what everybody here does? How do you calculate for P/E based on the premise of a pitch running on nothing but ballsiness?_ ) 

He considers that maybe the prank is an internal experiment that involves monitoring senior employees’ reactions to unexpected stressors. That would explain the presence of some of the more outré art installations that have begun to pop up all over the compound, notably the garden sculpture made entirely out of human teeth collected from various Southeast Asian communities.

He nearly forgets about the notice entirely, until two weeks later. As promised, another notice arrives at his desk, identical to the first except for the date stamp. The message this time around is a single line, in the same calligraphic style, in green ink this time. More importantly, it’s patently ridiculous.

 

_Congratulations; a new chapter begins today_!

 

It’s a little disturbing, but nothing out of keeping with the Hooli style guide. ( _Enthusiastic tone, brief phrasing, broad message — all present._ ) It makes him wonder if he’s done anything to earn the ire of the copywriting team. In any case, this time it stays there, in the clatter of his background brain activity, waving in and out in the form of some abstract hope for something shockingly new, and the residual dread that if the second notice comes true, then he’ll be dead in ten years’ time. Well, dedicating your life to the most ostensibly progressive company in the world, which happens to be the most ethically challenged company in all of Silicon Valley, is kind of its own death sentence.

He checks his watch compulsively. The waiting lounge outside Gavin Belson’s office is dissonantly cool and suffocating. There are pamphlets stacked on a metal tray, filled with benign platitudes about Hooli’s disruptive innovation, Hooli’s dedication to forward-thinking enterprise, Hooli’s belief in the primacy of the everyday individual despite rising to become a market leader, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Gavin’s spiritual advisor, Denpok, sat on the other side of the L-couch, gives him a solemn little nod, and goes back to flipping through his smartphone.

He considers discussing the note to get it out of his system. Maybe he’ll turn it into a mental exercise. Maybe he’ll bring it up in the middle of the usual shop talk. Maybe if he brings it up enough, he’ll find another employee being plagued by the prank. Then, this can all be over. Maybe.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re informed that you only have ten years to live, and it’s absolutely certain, irrefutable, inescapable, that in ten years you will cease to be. What do you do?” He asks.

“Hmm. That is an interesting question.” Denpok pauses with the tips of his fingers forming a cage that should look like a gesture of calm concentration, but instead reminds him a little bit of Charles Montgomery Burns, minus the yellow skin and the formalwear. “Well, I suppose I would sort all my affairs, leave no loose ends, perhaps make sure I leave my legacy intact, or else tell everybody what I’ve always wanted to say. Perhaps let people know what I truly think.”

He nods slowly, at first in understanding, then even slower, with an added layer of confusion.

“I sense you’ve made an important realization,” Denpok says through a blank grin. 

“Uh. It’s just that I thought you were expected to provide unreserved honesty.”

Denpok nods calmly. “I am.”

“So shouldn’t you be telling people what you truly think, regardless of the, uh, warning?”

Denpok nods again, even slower. He does it thrice, then gets up. “You are truly wise, Jared,” he says as he exits the waiting area.

Jared checks his watch and works out how many hours he has left until the workday ends.

Later that day, things fall into place. He finds himself back in the same waiting area, witnessing a fierce tug of war for groundbreaking IP, a mousy coder with eyes widened and hands trembling, helplessly caught in the center of it all, eventually making a run for the elevator. He thinks about how much it must take to only maybe consider signing onto a multimillion dollar deal. He thinks about the mix of trepidation and excitement in Richard Hendricks’ exceptionally bright eyes. He thinks about a world in which he irrefutably, immutably, undeniably had only exactly nine years and fifty weeks left to live.

The day’s notice springs out to the fore of his thoughts:  _Congratulations; a new chapter begins today_!

And so it goes.

 

* * *

 

Reverence has its moments of brilliance, its rare moments of comfort, and sometimes its clichés, in doxological delusions, in ornamental rituals, in the twisting of personal principles all in the name of desperately protecting some abstract, inexplicably vital thing. It’s lifted him up in stretches of misery — looking up at his mother's distant blue eyes lovingly, to each move from foster home to foster home shining with the glow of boundless potential. It's transformed Hooli from a capitalist vacuum into a bastion of innovation and progressive thought, and turned Pied Piper into something else entirely. If there’s one thing that reverence supplies, in overwhelming abundance, it’s in its distractions. 

He’s managed to delay any sort of confrontation to do with the business of the consistently prompt, consistently accurate predictions of the notices he still manages to receive despite having unofficially moved into a hostel room, then a guest house, then a garage, then finally back to his old East Palo Alto condo. Some nights he reviews the cards, sorted by date, progressing from the calligraphic flourishes to blotchy analog typewriter bleeds, to a card with three lines of Unicode 7.0 emoji — an egg with a man and a crying face, fire and a desktop computer, a cat with a skull and a question mark — et cetera, et cetera. 

He manages to find subreddits detailing a series of strange correspondences, the nature of which sounding vaguely like his own set of dispatches. Any attempts to reveal the exact contents of the notices seem to end with the user going missing, any conceivable trail wiped clean from the face of the internet.

He’s considered other options, sure. He’s imagined devoting the rest of his life to the indulging of hedonistic curiosities he’s maybe sort of considered indulging. Maybe he would have, if he hadn’t already acted so recklessly, to traumatic ends. He ran off once, at fourteen years old, with two foster siblings, and ended up in the underground bunker of a doomsday cult for six long months, from which only he managed to escape, and barely.

He’s imagined finding someplace temperate, leisurely, far from the Bay Area’s frenetic energy. He probably would have, if Pied Piper hadn’t pulled him in the way miserable people are so easily pulled in by religion — whole-heartedly, overwhelmingly, helplessly. And so he finds himself finding things to admire about Pied Piper, a sailboat in a thunderstorm, a blunt knife in a gunfight, a teardown shack run feverishly by rash idealists attempting to make the world a better place, somehow. He fears Dinesh and Gilfoyle, with the kind of fear that seems to come part and parcel with respect. He envies Erlich’s brazenness, Monica’s shrewdness. Bighead and Jin Yang amuse him. He adores Richard, who is a little bit like a small flame, on a delicate wick of a thin, brittle candle, threatening to burst unexpectedly in rare moments of brilliance or puff out unceremoniously at the slightest gust of wind. He appreciates the person he’s become — a relaxed version of himself, rid of the scrupulous routine, swapping stuffy blazers for cozy sweater vests, unexpectedly enjoying the team’s indecorous brand of humor, slackening his posture some, someone less of a sycophant, driven by an earnest, unabated desire to see all of this — Pied Piper, Richard Hendricks and his brilliant vision, this strange family they’ve all somehow become — emerge triumphant, against whatever it is they’re going against.

There should be something troubling about romanticizing unshakeable resilience in the face of unbridled, repeated foolishness, a surging straight into the mouth of madness in the name of some quest for independence, validation, retribution, maybe some glory, and falling flat on their faces every single time, but he’s put worrying about all of that on the back-burner. 

The year is 2016. It’s the start of another workweek. The kind of workweek that Jared officially kicks off with the receipt of prophetic dispatches that, so far, seem to become more accurate the more aggressive his attempts to challenge anything they contain. So far, the notices have a prediction rate with a hundred percent accuracy. He’s learned to just roll with it, even plainly ignoring them some weeks and revisiting their contents later. He opens up the new envelope and shrugs at three figures printed into the middle of the page. He slots it in a shelf neatly packed with the rest of the notices. He wants to pretend it doesn’t bother him, but the message wedges itself in the wrinkles of his cortex, disturbing, vexing, curious, and above all, _really stupidly silly_.

 

  _;-)_

 

That something as abstractly silly should be a thought that disturbs him — enough to ready a tally of winks received, in real life, online — is unfair, but most people, he reasons, can’t help how they feel.

It stays there all week, in his mind, like printed film laid onto his corneas, a floating ghost haunting the periphery, taunting him all week. And it is a taxing workweek, uneventful, yet demanding all the same. It ends the way Pied Piper workweeks end when most matters aren’t so pressing (that is, rarely) — over bottles of beer, a game of Switch Pitch, the sickly smell of weed wafting in the air, hardware still plugged in, whirring hot,  _just in case something comes up, you never know_. He hadn’t actually intended to bring up his situation, packaged as a benign mental exercise, but something about the relief of having no pressing needs to meet, all the exhaustion accrued from the week finally catching up, pushes the question out of him like a compressed coil eagerly springing free.

“Just making sure, but this is like, hypothetically, you’re for sure going to die in ten years, right?” Dinesh asks, a hand in the air like he’s trying to physically grasp the premise of the question. “Because, you know, this technically means you have, like, no free will anymore. Ever. Like, every choice leading up to your death is just stuff that causes the next thing that causes the next thing that causes your death.”

“Isn’t your family Shi'ite? Don’t Shi’ites believe in predestination?” Gilfoyle interrupts.

“Yes, they are. And actually, it’s the complete opposite, but you wouldn’t know that. Anyway, shit, I don’t know, because I don’t give a fuck. Also because I believe in free will.”

“You have all the imagination of an app namer,” Gilfoyle drones.

“Fine, maybe I’ll go try to find true love. Or something. Whatever,” Dinesh whines, fumbling with the Switch Pitch ball and tossing it to Gilfoyle. 

“Well, Jared,” Gilfoyle pipes in, “first off, this question is pretty pedestrian as far as hypothetical scenarios go. Secondly, the left-hand path prescribes living a way of life as if a grave sentence is already hanging over your head and threatening to cut your ties to this mortal realm at any given moment. Fact: the only certain thing in this life is that it all ends in death.”

They all stare at Gilfoyle, in choked silence. Erlich wheezes through his bowl, blows a thick cloud, and passes it to Monica, who scrunches her face as she promptly shoves it back in his face.

“What I’m saying is, every moment you’re still breathing is merely the delay of your certain demise. It’s only natural to try to get some pleasure out of life,” Gilfoyle clarifies. He gestures vaguely to the whole of the room. “Anyway, this is it for me.”

“That’s… really underwhelming,” says Monica, slumping into the couch, putting her feet up on the table.“I don’t know about you guys, but ten years? I am booking the hell out of Palo Alto. Cash in my shares. See everything I’ve always wanted to see. Maybe move to Amsterdam. Spend down my savings in my last two years.”

“Finally puff some big, fat smoggy circles right in Laurie Bream’s face when you file your resignation?” Erlich suggests.

“I’m going to enjoy myself, not be an asshole for the sake of being an asshole,” Monica snaps.

“Mmm-hmmmm,” Erlich says, nodding. “Respectable, but a waste of a good _Netflix quit_ opportunity. I would devote the rest of my years to securing my legacy — may the name Erlich Bachmann live long after my eventual, undoubtedly spectacular demise. I’ll be starting a cult devoted to spreading my wisdom, like a real life Book of Arnold.” 

Jared turns to Richard, who has been notably quiet all evening. “What about you, Richard?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Richard says, with a shrug. “I guess I don’t really like to think about dying. Death. Life ending. At all.”

“Classic tech leader thinking,” Erlich interjects, booming with braggadocio. “You’re like Sergey Brin on a quest to solve death. Peter Thiel harvesting the blood of the young. Mark Zuckerberg investing in every fucking biotech startup this side of the Bay Area. The poor fuckers who funded Theranos.”

“Peter wanted to acquire Theranos,” Monica mumbles, taking a huge gulp of beer. “Thank god Laurie passed,” she follows, slamming her bottle on the table.

“You know, the same could also be said of some of our most esteemed pop hacks. NDT and Elon Musk going on about multiverses, or if everything in this world is nothing but a simulation,” Gilfoyle muses.

“That’s really not the same thing,” Dinesh argues. 

“They talk a lot of garbage about an alternate world where the presently dead still walk among the living,” Gilfoyle explains. “If you’re alive in another universe, do you ever really die at all? Or some bullshit like that.” 

“Billionaires are the worst,” Monica says. 

“The whole damn valley,” Erlich adds. 

“No, no,” Richard interrupts quickly, meekly, frustratedly. “I mean, always having to make every decision that, you know, factors in how close you are to dying? It’s just, uh, it feels like a lot of unnecessary stress. This is already stressful, as it is. I mean, I don’t really want to have to live a life where I’m doing whatever stuff because I’ll be dying soon,” he clarifies, with hands gesturing manically, hurrying like he wants to get this conversation over with. “So maybe I’ll ignore the deadline. Just. It sounds like an awful thing to have to think about.”

Jared thinks he catches Richard looking at him and then quickly turning away, as Richard continues, this time quietly, “but I guess I’d start living more truthfully. Be more upfront to most people. When it matters, that is. _Especially_  when it matters.”

Everybody nods, and the room goes quiet. Richard presses his palms to his face. “Ugh, that’s a lame answer.”

Jared lays a hand on Richard’s shoulder and gives it a reassuring squeeze. When Richard peeks at him through the gaps between his stretched fingers, he can’t help but smile, helplessly charmed. He turns to the rest of the team, claps his hands together and folds them on his lap.

“Thank you, everybody,” he says. “This has been revelatory, really. I think we all just learned a lot more about each other tonight. And, you know, I really appreciate your honesty. It’s been quite sobering.”

“Yeah, too sobering,” adds Dinesh.

“More beer?” Erlich offers.

 

* * *

 

At the end of the night, when everyone else has nodded off, Monica headed home, Richard tells Jared he’d like to talk about something important, which is how they end up lying side by side, staring at the messily spackled ceiling, squeezed onto Richard’s impractically sized loft bed.

They’ve been talking like this for months now. They find themselves talking in moments of deep, profound, sweeping exhaustion, trying to function through some inexplicable weight, like a sputtering faucet in a drought, a fan whirring loudly to temper overheated circuitry. They talk in some miserable effort to drive out a grief that seems to sneak up on them out of nowhere. Tonight there is, thankfully, nothing to grieve over, no present pain to delay. They swap stories instead of getting to whatever it was Richard was supposed to have asked about.

“I don’t know, I don’t think you can top any of my top five most pathetic moments,” Richard says, with unironic certitude, nudging Jared with his elbow. “The name thing, that doesn’t count.”

Jared frowns at him, hyperbolically upset, and breaking with a soft laugh. “Why not?” He asks.

“Because, uh. Hmm. I can tell you like this name better,” Richard says, a little sheepishly. “Or, you know. You like it a little bit. More than your actual name.”

Jared laughs at the suggestion, but mentally files that into the back-burner for later consideration.

“Okay. Well, I’m desperate for validation,” He begins. “I bussed and waited at a brasserie to pay my way through Vassar. Every time I’d get an order for anything well done, I’d pretend I was also being secretly congratulated,” he says plainly.

Richard’s mouth twists like he’s heard something utterly ridiculous, and quickly turns his face away. Jared can hear him stifling a laugh into the mattress. “I’m sorry,” Richard says. “I’m sorry. It sounds sad. It sounds really, really sad,” he says, in between a few more laughs. “I don’t know why I’m laughing, this is really mean. I’m sorry.”

They both laugh, out of embarrassment, out of exhaustion, and on Jared’s part, out of maybe some trepidation over their physical closeness. Richard presses the back of his hand on Jared’s chest as he attempts to stifle his laughter. When he finally catches his breath, Jared finds Richard looking straight at him, eyes wide with intent, his hand unmoving from where it rests over his chest.

“About what I was going to say… I’ve been thinking about that question. From earlier, I mean. And, you know, what I said, about being more upfront?” Richard stammers, voice cracking and almost soundless. 

“Have you been worrying about that? Oh Richard, I’m so sorry,” Jared says, impulsively reaching for Richard’s hand, which surprisingly does not flinch away, which in turn makes his hand recoil in a moment of bewilderment.

“No, it’s uh. It’s not that,” Richard says, almost soundlessly, eyes still concentrating like he’s trying to make an effort not to reflexively turn away. “It’s not that. It’s… it’s…”

Richard’s hand moves up from Jared’s chest to cup his jaw. “I’ll stop if you tell me this is inappropriate,” he whispers. “It’s just, I feel like this has been maybe a little overdue.” 

Jared makes an attempt to make an intelligible reply, something like, say,  _I concur, but I think we should be considering the nuances of our situation, because as you know, you’re my boss, which means this is highly inappropriate, and I’m going to die soon, but I don’t actually know how relevant that is here, this might be presumptuous, I don’t know if you’re planning on setting any goals, but the thing is I’m going to die soon so I can’t make any long-term commitments._ Instead, he reaches up to squeeze Richard’s bony wrist and presses a kiss to the back of his trembling hand. He closes his eyes and keeps his mouth there, until Richard’s hand slackens, until it goes from frigid to warm, a few fraught seconds that seem to stretch on, a suspended moment of maddening stillness.

In another world, if Jared were perhaps less selfish, less reverent, less fearful of a silly set of promptly delivered, maddeningly vague, categorically foreboding notices, less desperate for affection, someone with a more balanced opinion of one Richard Hendricks, maybe, just maybe he wouldn’t be going through with this. Maybe, if he could remember if he wrote in a strict HR policy on workplace-appropriate conduct, even if this technically doesn’t count, because it’s not exactly billable hours, maybe he wouldn’t be kissing Richard, and he wouldn’t be deepening the kiss, and he wouldn’t be moving his mouth down to Richard’s neck. Maybe, if he were a more principled sort of person, he would be pulling Richard’s hands away, and he wouldn’t let his shirt be so hastily unbuttoned, and he wouldn’t be tugging both hands a little too tightly on the back of Richard’s neck, and he wouldn’t let Richard climb on top of him, or peel both their shirts off, or run his mouth down hungrily from his neck to his chest to his belly, or unzip his pants, and he would definitely control his hips from eagerly arching up as Richard kisses him hard through his already slightly damp boxers before pulling them down, because there’s definitely an HR policy against workplace relations, or romances of any nature, or something relevant, if he could only remember the specifics, and because the bed is much too small to support the both of them like this, and much too high for any of this to not end disastrously, and he can definitely hear the bed's metal joints creaking, and he still has eight more years left to live, so he definitely can’t die like this.

 

* * *

 

He’s explained the details — the onset, the minutiae, the fruitless research — like he would a pitch. He hands Richard the first notice, flips through the deck to lift out a few cards with predictions that he’s sure Richard will somehow recognize, and lays them all in a neat row on Richard's crisp coverlet.  _It’s sort of like Pascal’s Wager; it’s safer to assume that this is all true_.

“Fuck,” Richard gasps, rocked by fear. “Come on. This is insane.”

“I felt the same way, for maybe the first four months,” Jared states plainly.

“And right now you’re… not fazed?” Richard inquires, breathless, incredulous. 

“I’ll admit, at first it irritated me that I might have somehow owed most of who I am today to… _this_.” _Or, you know, the fear of certain death,_ he thinks. He collects the cards and files them back in place, stacking them neatly and settling them into a corner. “Now I’m just convinced that I can adjust to almost anything,” he continues, making an effort to sound less wry and more hopeful.

“This can’t be real. This… that’s. Come on, it's stupid,” Richard stutters, anxious and angry. “It’s just… it’s like that stuff the guys said last month, that stuff about free will. Or, you know, actually, _no_  free will. Which I find hard to believe. This is just. It’s ridiculous, right? I mean, come on.” 

That death can be perceived so clearly, with its definite deadline and stretched timeline flagged with fortnightly markers, should have filled him with endless dread. He considers that maybe he’s delayed confrontation for so long that he’s missed some window for prime comprehension, maybe, like the sheer difficulty of learning new dynamic motor skills for the the middle-aged. It’s not completely impossible to learn gymnastics, past anybody’s forties, but it is _almost_ impossible. He’s thankful that Richard is reacting violently, because he hasn’t allowed himself to react violently over any of this. Whatever this is. The countdown to his death, that is. _But aren’t we all headed there anyway,_ he thinks. 

He realizes he’s been staring blankly when Richard yanks him by the shoulders and gives a light shake. He blinks and collects himself, as Richard brings his hands to his face, checking to see if Jared is there, present, alert, and he feels a wave of emotion that comes out of him in the form of a rueful sort of smile. Having someone worry over him is so foreign. It’s only a little uncomfortable.

“Say something,” Richard pleads.

“You said you wanted to commit to a relationship. This is my way of saying I can’t,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady, normal, blunt. “Richard, it just wouldn’t be fair to you.” 

“You think it wouldn’t be fair to me because you might be dying in eight years?” Richard asks, high pitched and more than a little amused.

Jared smiles and shrugs his shoulders, an affectedly  _what-can-you-do_  gesture, as he makes an aborted attempt to pull Richard’s hands from where they’re gripping at the sides of his face. “First off,” Richard whispers, “I just… _can’t._ I can’t. Process it. And secondly, suppose it was true. You know what?”

He finds himself being pulled into a kiss that somehow manages to be aggressive yet gentle. “I don’t care,” Richard breathes into his mouth, again and again, and a calm spreads over him slowly, like a cool balm over bruised skin.

They’re tangled under a thick duvet as Jared recounts the events of each card, the ones that Richard’s missed out on, like being stuck on an artificial island run by drones and automated labor machines. Most of the events are funny, if a little cruelly so. They ponder on self-fulfilling prophecies and free will and superpositional states. They decide that pondering on any of it at all is a futile, if entertaining, waste of time. Jared drags his fingers to trace loops along Richard’s back as he asks him if there’s any place in the world he’s ever hoped to see. 

“The first chance we get,” Richard mumbles into his hair, “we should definitely take a leave. Three months? I’m making it mandatory.I mean, we’ve earned it, don’t you think? No, we’ve definitely earned it.”

 

* * *

 

They file for a six-week leave, some months later. By way of the leanness of Pied Piper’s on-site staff and the necessity of assessing and justifying the concurrent prolonged absence of two major company partners, it somehow,  _somehow_ slips out that they’ve been seeing each other. Somehow. It is somehow forced out of them. Somehow. By Erlich, of course. Who would willingly disclose the one part of their private lives they’d been working to keep quiet, and to these people? Not Jared. _Maybe._ It was an honest mistake. They were going to tell them, anyway.

“Yeah, we didn’t know how to tell you guys this, but we kind of already knew,” Dinesh starts. 

“This house has really thin walls,” Gilfoyle says, flatly. 

“And you guys are, like, not fucking subtle,” Dinesh adds.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Richard breathes, mortified. He turns to Jared, impulsively tugs at his cuffs as Jared stares at the rest of them with a blank expression.

Erlich barely looks up from his single-serve pack of Fage. “Whatever, I had no idea anything was going on, but congrats,” he says, swirling a thin plastic spoon around the cup.

“Well, I’m moved that you all chose to respect our decision to keep our private lives private,” Jared says. 

Nobody responds. Everybody looks away, awkwardly concentrating on whatever happens to be behind them, or on the ceiling, or on the floor, or wherever else, as long as it isn’t in anybody else’s line of sight. Jared compulsively checks his wristwatch. He could have sworn he heard a bell toll, somewhere in the distance.

Dinesh finally holds his hands up. “Shit guys, I was kidding. We had no idea,” he says.

“But you basically confirmed it for us anyway,” Gilfoyle adds, holding up his hands and wiggling his fingers, jazz hands style. Dinesh grudgingly slaps a few crumpled bills into it, with a sigh.

“Well, now that we know that this has all been happening right under our noses, it’d be great if it could stay that way.” Erlich says, jabbing his plastic spoon up, pointing the yogurty end at Jared. “You really are a stealth fucker,” he says, with no trace of irony. “Good job.”

“Thanks?” Jared says. 

“Whatever, anyway Monica is the one who’s supposed to be signing off on this,” Gilfoyle says.

“Yeah, uh, about that. Monica already did, we just kind of needed to, uh, _formally inform everybody else of our scheduled absence._ ” Richard answers, clipped as he repeats Monica’s words, verbatim.

“Wait. Monica already knows?” Erlich yells, immediately switching gears. “What the fuck!”

“Well, as the corporate secretary, she has to sign off on all administrative decisions, so it really is her business knowing this,” Jared explains.

“What the fuck, Jared! I let you into my house. You’re supposed to trust me the most,” Erlich yells again, sounding greatly wounded. 

“Meh, that’s fair,” Dinesh and Gilfoyle interject in unison, stopping, recoiling, and exchanging disgusted looks.

“We really could have lived out the rest of our lives with you guys just fucking in secret and never telling us shit,” Dinesh follows.

“You’re just saying that because you bet that they were all no-homo and too chickenshit to bone,” Gilfoyle says, in a deadpan-smug sort of way.

Jared squints as he watches them disappear into the kitchen. The voyeuristic part of him can’t help but follow slowly, just a few feet behind, and ask, “hey guys, what were the mechanics of the bet, exactly?”

 

* * *

 

The world has shifted greatly, sometimes beautifully, other times terribly. 

Jared remembers once reading a book written by a priest, about a time when the world would reach a turning point — an upwelling of every disparate figure in the world, every isolated pin on the scatterplot map of all of humanity converging into something whole, a forceful current turning chaos into order, everything at once complex and clear. A still point in the turning world. In the American West Coast, the same notion is peddled, dripping with a bitter, banal, platitudinal tang, that every single innovator is dedicated to  _making the world a better place_. It’s only when he steps out of the electric hum of Silicon Valley that he sees how true that can be.

And oh, how things have changed. Some changes are silly yet delightful, like seeing unlikely connections made over Pokémon Go. Some of it is wonderful, like witnessing a non-routine birth shift from a crisis into a quick resolution with an app and a phone call. He overhears a woman wedged in a corner of a café speaking to a full house — several loud children and one overjoyed father — different points in the world connected by a single app. When he realizes that chunks of her words are in english, like _I see you. The net here is bad but I see you_ , and it dawns on him that the app they’re using is Pied Piper, he looks up their highest usage rates and sees the surge in developing countries with poor network infrastructure capacities. The highest spikes, he observes, come from periods during and following natural disasters. He tries not to sob as he reads the digest to Richard.

They see the world outside their insular North American bubble and find that the world has become so, so strange. For all the simplicity and convenience that tech has provided, the natural world is still much more forceful. It is far too difficult to predict anything, these days.

During an unexpected swing in the monsoon season, summertime in the other side of the globe turning unseasonably cold and trapping cities under a brutal deluge, they spend days stuck indoors exploring each inch of each other. In the morning they’re tangled in bed, and Jared drags his teeth as he kisses from the side of Richard’s knee up to his inner thigh. By noon, he’s pinned up against the wall with one of Richard’s hands pressing down on his shoulder, the other one down pulling him hard from end to end, his mouth biting down where his neck meets his collarbone. Later, their ragged breaths are drowned out by the sound of running water, Richard up against the cool tiles, fingers threaded together, and he plants light kisses down the back of Richard’s neck as he pushes inside him. Richard swears he hasn’t been religious for years, isn’t devout, has no reverence for anything abstractly divine, doesn’t believe in any god, but that’s the name he's rasping out again and again, in between heavy breaths, mouth obscenely wide open, loud even over the violent hiss of the shower’s spray.

When the sun goes down, the sky still open in a gray haze, an inexhaustible sky pouring down on the roof above their heads in a violent rattle, they lie in bed and close their eyes. Jared considers the humid breeze from the fan spinning over their heads, the palm tree outside valiantly standing its ground even as it bends back against the wind and the rainfall, Richard asleep, his head on his chest and an arm around his waist, the mild dread of the expiry date that’s always in the back of his mind, closes his eyes tight and takes it all in. In quiet moments, he finds himself latching onto these small signs that remind him he does not totally regret life. He can’t help but sigh at it all.

One funny thing Jared learns about Richard is that he’s absolutely terrified of fast cars. He zips their rental through hairpin turns as he drives the both of them up steep slopes, going until a heavy mist fogs up their windows, a crisp chill sneaking into the car and in their seats as the sky darkens. The whole time, Richard’s hand is tight on his shoulder, but he says nothing, and so Jared drives them up and up to the sound of light snowfall and the rental's sole CD running on its second cycle, a voice softly crooning over the clang of guitar strings, singing _I really don’t know life at all._  

The northern lights are scheduled to dim in 2016, not to be seen until a decade later. He can’t recall having ever felt a great desire to see the lights up close, but the last few years, he’s been feeling a strange pull to anything with a definite exit schedule. And so they hike, their lungs filling up with air, trees shed in the cold shooting up at a purple sky, a green and blue and red blanket thrown over the stretch of it all, delicate like cotton, dancing like fire, a geomagnetic storm swelling overhead, hues flung internecine and psychedelic over the dark night and flecks of city lights twinkling in the distance. 

“I didn’t really care for this before. I can’t believe it,” Richard says, attention completely absorbed by the sky above, green and purple flares reflected on his eyes.

Jared watches him looking up and wonders how being in the presence of something phenomenal can make it feel even more distant, unfathomable, impenetrable. He looks up at the furling and unfurling of lights and it reminds him of being a child, desperately trying to hold on to the gusts of wind slipping in and out of his hands in the springtime.

He checks his watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooli's human teeth sculpture was inspired by two things: the Dropbox Austerity Panda. (That is, an actual $100k chrome panda figure that is actually on display in the actual Dropbox HQ, which is actually there to actually remind Dropbox employees to actually spend their money wisely.) Also, the emergence of startups dedicated to producing lab-grown human elements for art and fashion. (Like making high fashion human skin bags out of Alexander McQueen’s shaven and cultivated DNA.)
> 
> Erlich got the term “Netflix quit” from Crazy-Ex Girlfriend, to mean quitting your job as in the dramatic TV/film tradition. He also makes a reference to the sci-fi infused Mormon story from The Book of Mormon in the same line.
> 
> Erlich’s comments about Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg funding research aiming to cure human death have all been well-reported. Peter Thiel has reportedly been injecting himself with the blood of the young to gain their energy. I urge you to Google it, if you’re looking for something both amusing and horrifying. Gilfoyle’s references to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk musing about life being a simulation are based on multiple tweets and conference conversations.
> 
> Jared uses Pascal’s Wager to explain his situation to Richard. It’s an argument from Blaise Pascal with the thesis, in the most reductive sense, being: we’ll never be able to prove if God exists, but it’s best to live life believing he probably does, because if you bet against it and you’re wrong, then you’re screwed.
> 
> On the way to see the northern lights, they listen to the rental car's Joni Mitchell CD. The song referenced is Both Sides Now.


	2. A true account of talking to the sun over Palo Alto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not the cards that bother him, or the warnings they contain. It's the physical reminder that life contracts, and death is expected.

Richard remembers his parents driving him out to the airport for the first time. He’s getting out of Tulsa, hopefully for good, and he’s sat in the back seat with his luggage, watching the stretch of his hometown shrink in the rearview mirror. He remembers feeling sick from something that must have been from the air outside, then taking deep breaths until the oxygen filling his lungs makes something stir in him. He remembers growing up having dreamt of leaving Oklahoma, leaving behind all of the bullshit he's ever had to deal with, good riddance, fuck everybody. He remembers sitting in the car taking deep breaths until he’s shaken by the cold, confidence-killing force of cognizance: he’s out, finally out, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not actually Tulsa, not school, not the damn neighborhood that’s made him miserable all this time. ( _Or at least, not entirely. Hey, credit where credit’s due. Some children can be so cruel._ ) And so Richard, at seventeen, sat in the backseat of his parents’ car, tries not to retch as hope and fear tug at every isolated chaotic electric grain making up his skinny adolescent body, because he has been looking forward to the future, he really fucking has — to Stanford, to coding his way out of the veritable nightmare of the life he's had to endure, to all the possibilities laid before him, because people tell him he’s brilliant, and being brilliant is all you ever really need, the rest can follow. But god, the car is rolling out further, and his home is a flat line reflected on the plane of a fogged-up rearview mirror, and he’s leaving behind the only life he’s ever known. 

It’s difficult to describe the way he’s wired. How does anybody describe feeling different conflicting waves of emotion rushing all too intensely, and all at once? How pathetic would it be to admit that every moment, it feels like every nerve is pressing down on his whole body, crushing him down until he’s crawling on the ground, going through the motions, wishing life would just get itself over with? How uncomfortable would it be to have to deal with him knowing that almost every single goddamn thing overwhelms the living shit out of him? And so he channels it all — the volley of nerves that make up the whole of who he is — into the force of terror, and terror means he’s always rushing.

It’s rushing that gets him kicked out of Stanford. It’s rushing that makes him throw himself into the hacker hostel. It’s rushing that propels him through the very first version of Pied Piper — through early dev, through commits, through the build, scrapping RLE for LZ and scrapping LZ for something he’s made up on the fly because he’s rushing, and he rushes through working out functions, until there are iterative loops in the recursions and the code is repeating, and he’s repeating himself, and he’s repeating the same problems over and over again, and he can’t believe he thought for eight solid months that he could coast by on just building an app that he thought would just take off because it was clever, and not because it was a thing people actually needed, and that the business and all the rigorous legwork somehow just sort itself out, like a machine-learned corollary of the probabilistic model he ends up with, an absolute Frankenstein’s Monster of an algorithm. But, here's the thing: how does anybody even begin to crawl out of a physical kind of torment that is quite possibly embedded into every pore?

He wonders how long he can get by on people just throwing support his way, at any given point in his life, for anything, at any scale, at any scope, at every frequency. He’s practically nothing, otherwise. In Tulsa, he needed his parents to push him into accelerated programs, and he needed the school’s counselors and all his Math teachers to shove Ivy League pamphlets his way, and he needed Bighead to tell him when he was being an idiot, which was every single time something was swimming in his mind, and it had nothing to do with schoolwork. In Palo Alto, he needed Peter Gregory’s foresight to realize the value of his algorithm before he could, just as he needed Laurie Bream’s insight to believe in the value of his proficiency before he could, just as he needed Gavin Belson’s corruption to appreciate the value of sticking to some goddamn principles. The thing is, he’s a cynic, it’s no big, just trust issues, so he’ll never believe in any claim without some cold, hard data to back it up, and he’ll probably never see the value in anything speculative unless someone sets the market price first, and he’ll never understand why anybody would give him the goddamn time of day, unless someone tells him that he matters, just the way he is, maybe specifically for being the way he is, regardless of what he has to offer, despite the fact that he’s less of a person and more of a walking panic attack.

And now, _here he is_.

Richard remembers the first time he’s ever taken a plane, all by himself. He remembers it taxiing, the engine booming as the plane tilts up, gripping at the ends of the armrests until his knuckles turn white. He remembers the plane's body rattling like thunder, barely drowning out the sound of his heart knocking in his chest, insides rocked by a contrapuntal rhythm, trepidation and excitement taking hold of him. He remembers looking out the window, the sun getting in his eyes, his body overcome with a surge of something indescribable.

He used to laugh at the notion of people throwing themselves so fully and so eagerly and so recklessly into romance. How funny, and how strange.

 

* * *

 

When they get back to Palo Alto, the first thing Richard does is get to the hacker hostel on a weekend to collect his things. It’s Jin Yang who opens the door, grinning as he asks, “gaycation over?”

He pads into an empty house and quietly gathers his hardware, his shoes and clothes, his books, and he peels off his posters, and he packs his things into a box, and he sets it all down and tapes it all shut. He goes into the garage, sits on the cot that’s been empty for almost a year now, and wonders how the hell Jared ever managed months of sleeping right beside the servers, with its cramped and burning and suffocating everything, an absolute hotbox of an enclosure with a poor excuse for a bed in the middle. He wonders if he would have stuck it out with Pied Piper for the first few fucked up years, living like this.

He looks down and notices something sticking out from underneath the cot. He reaches under its creaky legs and picks up a small piece of paper, in thick white card stock, with a note on the front. He takes it and makes a mental note to track the next delivery, and shake some answers out of whatever asshole's been sending them.

The thing is, he couldn't care less about the cards. He can't bring himself to believe in anything with absolutely zero empirical evidence to back it up. The fact that the cards have a track record of 100% accuracy is meaningless, because most of the time what’s in them is broad and therefore meaningless, and believing in them is like believing in horoscope predictions, and Richard is firmly, resolutely, aggressively _not_  a believer in astrological impressions of any kind, from any source, direct or mysterious, because it’s a load of bullshit. It’s throwing darts at a broad target is what it is. It’s winning a game of chance with loose conditions. Even if it were binary, anybody could flip a coin again and again, the conventional expectation is to somehow land an even distribution of heads versus tails, forgetting that each toss is an independent event, and therefore getting lucky each time is definitely possible. Alternatively, if large numbers were considered, there haven't been plenty of chances for the cards to fuck up, anyway. Ten years of fortnightly cards means two hundred and sixty cards, total. The current number of received cards being sixty-six means that, at twenty-five percent, there are still plenty of opportunities to even the score. But he couldn't care less, because this has got to be some sick, long prank. It's meaningless. It's unequivocally illogical. Also, he couldn't care less. It does’t bother him.

Later that day, he calls up his parents, thankful that they've figured out video conferences, because voice calls just won't cut it. 

Some weeks later, he still couldn't care less. Sure, he's up at two in the morning on the floor of the living room in Jared's condo, cards sorted in different classes, first ascending by date, then sorted with subarrays, then isolating primitives to their abundant, then reshuffled and sorted comparator style until they're back to where they started, but that's nothing. There's no pattern, no clue, no hint of any slip-up tracing the cards back to their point of origin. It's pointless, and he's pointless, but the cards _really_  don't bother him.

When Richard wakes up, he's on the couch with a knit blanket wrapped around him, cards nowhere to be found, Jared wedged in the corner of the couch, fast asleep. He lifts his feet up from over Jared's bony legs, tucks his knees under his chin, and quietly waits for this side of the Earth to torque into the sun's general direction, right until the soft light sneaks in to siphon out the unease swelling in his head and in his chest and in the gloom of the evening, right as the morning brings about a daze of bliss.

It's not the cards that bother him, or the warnings they contain. It's the physical reminder that life contracts, and death is expected.

Jared stirs awake and whispers a good morning, maybe to Richard or just the room in general. When he turns to Richard, Richard puts on a smile.

 

* * *

 

It’s 2018 and Richard is in Monterey thinking, _this is it; this is where I die._  

The holding room for the night’s TED lineup is weird. It’s weird because the orange lights are harsh, and it's weird because the air plants hanging from the ceiling originate from different climates, and it's weird because of the mismatched wooden panels lining the space from corner to corner, floor to ceiling. Richard gets the intent of the minutiae, gets the isolated design decisions that seem expressly constructed to generate a kind of laid-back, rustic vibe — safe, warm, familiar. The collective gestalt, however, is a disingenuous mess. It's a bullshit salad tossed around by people with conflicting ideas of what _authentic_  looks like. _Fucking hipsters_.

It’s bullshit and he’s going on in an hour and he, Richard Hendricks, some fuck-up from Tulsa who got lucky because the right people found him at the right time, will be the first TED speaker in history to botch each and every single minute of his designated banal bullshit time. And it shouldn’t even be that big of a deal. Literally thousands of these have been delivered. God, what mess has he gotten himself into? Whoever expected anything edifying from the same guy running a pseudo-unicorn of a startup with a notoriously fucked up history of executive decisions, business transactions, legal disputes, product pivots, everything in general, really? His heart is racing. The room is spinning. His vision whittles down to a pinhole. He might puke.

When he feels a warm hand close over his cold wrist, he realizes he’s trembling. “Richard, you’ve got this,” Jared whispers in his ear.

They’re sitting side by side in the corner of a booth with plush seating, strategically positioned behind a large pot of palm leaves fanning out like tiny orbicular shields that barely hide them from the rest of the room. Richard makes an attempt to respond in a coherent fashion. Something like, maybe, _thanks, Jared. I feel better now. What would I ever do without you?_  Instead, he lets out a shaky breath. 

The hand on his wrist moves up to his shoulder. “You’ve got about hour to collect yourself,” Jared says, calm, reassuring, practical. A veritable anchor keeping him balanced as he waits for the customary twisting of his insides to ease up. 

He knows the drill. Eyes closed and deep breaths. One, one, two, three. Two, one, two, three. Three, one, two, three. He feels Jared’s hands gripping his shoulders, keeping him steady, and he has no idea why he’s still trembling.

“God, I’m terrible,” he says, and it sets off a Rube Goldberg style sequence of mechanical reactions that lead from one thing, to another thing, to another thing.Somehow he finds himself being gripped by the neck, lips pressed to his forehead, and that’s how he unthinkingly tugs at Jared’s collar and pulls him down for a kiss, and that’s how the fear of god shocks Richard in the form of a whistle coming from somewhere in the room, and that’s how he’s reminded that they’ve had company this entire time, and that’s exactly how he outs himself in public — to a room of high-profile tech and design leaders, who he realizes are mostly engrossed in their own conversations anyway, except for that one guy who whistled, and one intern close by — one who hopefully isn’t on documentation duty — with an iPad slightly raised. 

Jared already looks mortified for him, but only slightly, having already perfected the SOP with regards to _not causing a scene_. 

“It’s fine,” is all Richard says. The weird part is that it’s all completely true. He actually, legitimately feels absolutely, _across-the-board_ fine. He rests his forehead on Jared’s shoulder and checks the watch on Jared’s wrist. He works out that he’s got forty-seven minutes left on standby.

The stage is a semicircle lined by a black curtain behind, a throng of hundreds seated in front, blurred by the spotlights into red drops on a blackened sea. Richard breathes and taps on the mic pinned onto the inside of shirt, to check if it’s working. He clears his throat.

“We usually measure progress by economic growth, which in the most conventional sense means an increase in average per capita GDP.” he starts. “The thing is, that measure is completely irrelevant for cases like low-income households, areas with outdated infrastructures, and cultural segregations.”

A map of a city projects onto the screen behind him — a diffused blotch of fluorescent color-coded data points.

“I’m going to run you all through alternative ways to measure the progress of supposedly thriving cities — through political, technological, and social factors — what gaps in making progress still exist, and then I’m going to run you all through the ways that unfettered access to data can close a lot of those gaps.”

 

* * *

 

The night of Pied Piper's IPO launch, they gather for a round of drinks in the hacker hostel, formerly Pied Piper HQ, presently Erlich’s House, otherwise known as Bachmannia, or Casa Bachmann, or ground zero of the day the world wide web was almost single-handedly destroyed by one Richard Hendricks. Years and years later, Richard will suddenly wake at dawn, troubled by the realization that he never did figure out exactly what happened, that night.

It’s morning, and the room is a whorl of light and color poured into Weierstrass waves — smooth, blurry, and immensely disturbing. Someone’s drumming their fingers on a table in perfect time, down to the nanosecond, to the sound of cannons firing in the air right above the roof, which somehow lowered by about twelve feet overnight without Richard having ever noticed. He groans and it feels like the room is vibrating.

“All right, he's up. Sorta,” he hears Monica say. “This meeting is officially in session.”

“Okay, everyone in favor of enforcing a moratorium on Richard Hendricks getting shitfaced, raise a hand,” Erlich says.

Six skin-toned swirls shoot up in the air. He squints and tries not to retch as he sits up on the couch. When he falls over, he decides that the floor is fine.

“What happened?” Richard croaks. 

“Uh. Hmm, where to begin,” Bighead says. "Well, you had a lot of this stuff." He holds up a squat amber bottle with what Richard will later realize is a dead snake steeping in what’s likely to be corrosive chemicals. “Like, a fuckton, because Erlich was kind of egging you on, and you've still got issues about being called a wuss, I guess. I mean, at first it was pretty funny. Then you had some other stuff to drink. Then you said you were gonna pull off the greatest hack in history. And then you…”

Erlich puts a hand up and starts shaking his head. “Yeah, we shouldn't be mentioning any of that. Y'know, just to stay safe.”

"Everyone's phones are turned off, right?" Monica interjects. "No electronics."

“Wait, mention what?” Richard whines.

“Don't worry, it’s been handled,” Jared answers.

The swimming colors in Richard’s vision are starting to take shape, and he can work out from the volume of his voice that Jared must be maybe just a few inches away, so he tries to reach up, and his head bumps into the coffee table, with a bang. He squints and realizes that he has been on the other side of the room the entire time. The floor is fine.

“Speaking of handle, yeah, you're also banned from drinking cause you straight up sexually harassed this idiot and we've got a code of conduct here,” Gilfoyle adds, with a thumb pointed at Jared.

"I don't think there's any need to mention that,” Jared responds, defensively.

"You're just saying that because you were totally into it,” Dinesh counters. “And even then you're still kind of avoiding him. See, there should probably be some real consequences whenever someone violates any rule. Y’know, specifically so that this dipshit doesn’t go mad with power,” he finishes, pointing an accusatory finger in Richard's general direction.  

“Well, on the plus side none of us can say we weren’t, at the very least, immensely entertained. On the scale of tech leaders who’ve displayed destructive levels of unchecked hubris, I'd say Drunk Richard is right up there with the best of them. Maybe even up there with old Stevey, god rest his soul.” Erlich says.

“I also think it’s curious that Drunk Richard has a socialist vision for the world,” Gilfoyle says. “Maybe you should go see a therapist about that.”

Richard shakes his head, eyes wide, aghast and slightly disgusted at himself for no discernible reason. For all he knows, they’re just fucking with him. “Can anybody just tell me what the fuck happened?” He rasps.

Jared slides him a glass of water from across the table, without a word.

 

* * *

 

The thing is, it’s been four years and Richard still finds sex intimidating. Just like every coin toss is a new event, and not a thing you eventually get the hang of, and because every conversation introduces new opportunities for him to fuck things up, and because the human body confuses and overwhelms and slightly terrifies him, in general. And so he rushes through it, the same way he rushes every little decision, rushes through code and development and migrations and integrations and going to market and going public and scaling so swiftly and so absurdly immense that he’s already anticipating, somewhere in the back of his overheated neural wetware, Pied Piper’s slow descent into a Hooliesque monstrosity. But right now, none of that concerns him. Not at all. Not when he’s on a chair trying not to tip it over, not when he’s sitting on the chair in reverse, on the lap of someone who had already been occupying the chair first, and had the presence of mind to use that very chair the correct way, and not when the chair is a new chair, in a new bedroom, in a new condo, and there are hands sliding from his thighs up to his sides and a mouth over his mouth, not while he’s attempting, with excruciating difficulty, to unloose a goddamn belt.

He feels Jared’s hands gripping him by the shoulders, lightly pushing him away.

“I’m sorry,” Richard blurts out, instinctively. He tries not to breathe like he’s been running a marathon. He tries not to mind the hammering in his chest. “I mean,” he gasps, “what’s wrong?”

Jared smiles, soft and lopsided which means slightly, slightly troubled. He reaches out and runs a hand through Richard’s hair, deliberately slow. "Is there something on your mind?” He asks, a thumb tracing circles on the nape of Richard’s neck.

“I’m fine,” Richard breathes, and he tries to make it not sound like the lie that it is. “Totally fine,” he repeats, to get the point across, just in case. “Was I… uh, was I…” he squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t know how to finish that through-line, anyway.  _Awful?_

Jared laughs. From the look on his face, Jared has probably reached some intersection of amused and weirded out. Why does he put up with Richard, anyway? Why did he sign in onto Richard’s crap via joint ownership — specifically, of things like a needlessly exorbitant condo — when he’s so adamantly convinced he’s going to die in a couple of years?

“What?” Richard whines.

Jared just smiles, in a way that’s as if he’s trying to convince Richard that he’s putting up with all of this because he genuinely enjoys putting up with it. “Just try to relax,” he whispers.

“I’m relaxed,” Richard lies.

And that’s how Richard finds himself being tugged by the neck, steadily pulled in, hands slowly dragging up his hair, mouth slowly working its way from his jaw to his bottom lip, a tongue sliding in his mouth and moving frustratingly, unreasonably, agonizingly slow. Slow enough that the hands on the back of his head have slid their way down his back, to his hips, thumbs hooked by the waistband of his pants, tugging him closer, and even closer, and even closer, and he feels every sensation glacially, in interminable drips, in epic waves. He finds himself being steered up from the chair, walking backwards, hands on his hips pushing him gently, until he’s flat on his back on a bed that he has, at that very moment, officially christened, and he lies back as hands slide down his whole body, deliberately slow. Each fraction of each second stretches. He thinks of the mist that hangs in the sky parting to let the first rays of light through. He thinks of drops of water easing down from the whitened sky, hitting the earth’s rocky surface, again and again, polishing the roughened surface into something smooth and small as a single grain, clear and present and weighty, one second, and then, without warning, floating out of reach.

Richard dreams of a set of ominous missives, in print, delivered by mail, consistently prompt, consistently accurate, consistently unsettling. When his eyes snap open, their side of the earth is just about to pull into the light.

He strokes his fingers through Jared's mussed-up hair, considering the softness that seems to make anybody appear childlike and at ease, in sleep. When Jared wakes up, his eyes are vague and blue like the sky, and the sun’s just about to sneak into the cracked open window.

“What do you think about getting married?” Richard asks.

 

* * *

 

One day, Richard wakes up, turns to his side, and realizes Jared must have already gotten up. It’s only dawn. It’s unusual, but that doesn’t bother him. He gets up, puts on a shirt, and pads into the kitchen, which is clean and spotless and also empty. He moves to the living room, which is also clean and spotless and empty. He checks the bathrooms. He checks the two extra bedrooms. The whole condo is empty, save for himself. It’s unusual, but that doesn’t bother him. 

It’s a Monday, so when his watch hits eight, he goes through the routine like clockwork. He showers, gets dressed, and drives off to the compound. In the morning, he sorts through emails, checks his phone to see if he’s gotten any texts, goes through the previous week’s Gantt and other digests, checks his phone to see if he’s missed any calls, works out the scheduled QAs for new integrations, clutching his phone the entire time, just in case, and sorts through more emails, and before he knows it, it's dark out, and hasn't missed a single call. 

He flips through his contacts and clicks on the call button. 

However unusual this is, there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no clue if the more esoteric terminology makes this chapter annoying, so here's some of the technical-ish jargon explained:
> 
> RLE (Run-length encoding) and LZ (Lempel-Ziv) are universal lossless data compression algorithms. In canon, Richard mentions incorporating a neural network into Pied Piper, so I can only assume there’s a machine learning aspect to the product’s architecture, also mentioned-ish in the same paragraph.
> 
> When reasoning why the predictions Jared gets from the mail couldn’t possibly be real, Richard runs through the law of large numbers. The idea is a lot like when it’s easy for basketball players to sink their first few shots. The more shots you take, the less likely you are to sink them all. So, at that point, he thinks the sender’s just a sixty-six time lucky asshole.
> 
> Rube Goldberg machines are contraptions that start with a single trigger causing a chain of mechanical triggers leading to a usually simple conclusion. The opening titles of Back to the Future features a Rube Goldberg sequence.
> 
> Richard’s TED Talk was going to be about how applied data compression bridges the gap between poor infrastructure, inaccessibility, and the high cost of internet connectivity, and how that affects education, growth, and evenly distributed economic progress. The jumping-off point is from the family conference call that Jared eavesdropped on in the last chapter.
> 
> Weierstrass waves are a kind of function used in data compression to process image properties into blurs.


	3. The world is an iceberg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There he is, aimless, mindless, oblivious, moving along, being moved without his consent, to just wherever.

The year is 2019 and Jared wakes up convinced that he has been living in an imagined reality for the last six years. Maybe he isn’t even truly here, and his actual self is just locked up somewhere, left to waste away, and his mind has somehow constructed its own disturbingly nuanced, increasingly beautiful, shamelessly indulgent diegetic bubble in order to cope with whatever actual pains his body has to physically endure. Perhaps his real self is in a hospital, comatose, needles and tubes stuck into his arms and nose and mouth, a vegetable of a human being in the middle of a fixed ten-year waiting period, waiting for his number to come up, waiting for his mind to finally pack up and plug out. How else can he explain the gradual uptick of triumphs capriciously thrown his way?

He is, somehow, in a comfortable bed, in a room where the light is soft and the air is temperate, living a life he has done far too little to have properly earned, waking up most days to a particularly pleasant view. A view of piercing, thoughtful blue eyes and a light dusting of freckles only visible from a close, close range. A view that only he has the privilege of seeing. Just him. Every morning, he’d look at it, and immediately he would think, _all of this is too wonderful — _unjustifiably, devastatingly wonderful_. _ Some force is bound to pull the rug out from under his feet.

“What do you think about getting married?” Richard asks him.

He considers that perhaps the rug will smother him to death, instead.  

He won’t pretend that he hasn’t thought about it, or that he hasn’t considered it, or wasn’t secretly yearning for some deeply meaningful gesture in moments of delirium, especially during mornings, when the elements of disbelief still pull strong, when his mind’s only just stepped out of a dream. If the circumstances were different, he would be reacting differently. There would be a veritable deluge of tears, an enthusiastic outpouring of gratitude, there would be so much gratitude Richard would be drowning in it. So much he'd be gasping for air.

However, the situation is what it is.

“Why?” Jared snaps — a knee-jerk reaction that sounds exactly like what it is. _Panic_. 

“Look at it this way,” Richard starts. “You’ve been putting up with me calling you by another name for, what, six years now? I could change my name. I would, you know. I’d change my last name to your last name? I’d go by Richard Dunn,” he bargains, sounding unusually bright and earnest, considering the time of day.

Jared laughs, amused and flattered and a little off-put. The name is benign and boring and completely ill-suited for Richard. It’s horrible.

“That hardly sounds like it’s worth all the trouble,” Jared says, evasively.

“I already know what you’re going to say,” Richard starts, “but…”

_But_  is Jared’s cue to run through a chart he has on mental file. A chart that oh-so-conveniently has been floating around in his head, ready to be unlaced and unpacked. No, it’s always there. It’s there and it's labeled _Marriage: Richard Hendricks_. A chart of pros and cons. He knows which side he would favor, ideally, but he values the benefits of assessing any dispute from all angles. Which is _exactly_ why his position is what it is.

Strengths: everything about the life they’ve built, every little detail, trivial to vital, from the privilege of waking up every day to a particular view that still manages to take his breath away every single morning, to the fact that he is well aware that Richard, for all his efforts and talent and intellect, is so easily dispirited to almost self-destructive degrees when left alone. ( _However, all of this is perfectly possible without marriage. Its independent strength, he concludes, is ornamental._ )

Weaknesses: Pied Piper, as it so happens, but it’s not much of a weakness as it is a complex, tremendous, inalienable feature of their lives that just so happens to be riddled with inexhaustible factory defects, and repair work takes time. If he were being honest, there are other weaknesses, but he can’t bring himself to consider their major character flaws at such an early hour.

Opportunities: rights and benefits that he hasn’t personally thought much of, anyway. Well, it could certainly help with the taxes.

Threats: _his imminent death._

Objectively, marriage does not have much going for it.

“We’re all going to die, anyway,” Richard continues, as if he’s just reached in and pulled the words right out of Jared’s current mental through-line. “I mean, not now. Hopefully not soon. But it is gonna happen, someday.”

It’s brought up every time they make any major joint commitments, from pursuing a relationship, to moving in, to making a separate joint account, to purchasing a condo in a more upscale part of Menlo Park. He’ll say,  _Richard, I’d hate to leave you having to clean up whatever mess it is I’ll be leaving behind._  To which Richard will dispute, _Jared, I don’t mind. But what do you want?_  And so, here they are. 

“Do you know why Monica and I voted to stop letting you take pitch meetings, a few years back?” Jared asks, partially in jest, with some element of unease. Thoroughly evasive.

“Come on, I wasn’t that bad,” Richard says, laughing, sounding slightly wry. He props himself up by an elbow and shifts gears. “Look, how is being married different from all of… this?” He says, gesturing to the expanse of the room, possibly to the details of this diegetic bubble of a life they’ve been living. 

“That’s hardly a case _for_ it,” Jared counters.

Richard slumps back, flopping right onto the pillows. “I’m guessing that’s a no?” He says.

Jared smiles, soft, rueful, and apologetic, and reaches a hand out to the back of Richard’s neck, stroking small circles with his thumb.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Jared says.

And that was that.

 

* * *

 

What happens when a stressor is thrown at a supposedly robust system? A stressor such as, say, induced incompatibility? Will it eventually reach a point of metastability and transform into an indestructible, antifragile entity, even stronger after working through all identified vulnerabilities? Or, will it slowly begin to unravel at a low energy density scale, in small, significant bursts that are easy to miss, but difficult to repair?

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s a specific system, with a specific problem. And, in this case, Richard already suspects he knows the answer.

Here’s the thing: without any paper trail, without any signed dotted lines, without any hard, irrefutable, systematized proofs, Richard finds some statements hard to believe. But that is absolutely _not_  why he’s brought _it_ up. Or, it’s at least not the sole reason.  _It_ being _marriage_. He just thinks there’s some added value to it, as abstract as that value might be. Also, maybe he was just caught in a particular moment the first time, and now some stubborn, unreasonable part of him — an ugly part that wants to believe that his gut feeling makes choices that are emphatically correct, most of the time — just wants to put up a fight. Maybe he’s needier than he’s allowed himself to completely acknowledge. Maybe it’s the completist in him wanting to accomplish a set of milestones that are, supposedly, absolutely necessary in order for some isolated features of his little life to seem full and realized and ideal. Maybe he’ll just never be certain of anything, ever, and this was insurance. Maybe he’s doomed to never be certain, ever. Especially not when things are going so well, because the sum of things in his life never do stay in a suspended state of _going well_. Not for long, anyway. The rug was bound to be pulled out from under his feet. Funny, that he did all the pulling, himself.

Whatever the case, it’s been a few months since he asked. He’s stopped asking directly, but he’s still _kind of_  asking. Subtly. He doesn’t _want_  to look desperate. Also, he’s pretty sure he and Jared are going through some issues, in the low-frequency, gentle simmer way that people who live with each other tend to tolerate immutable, fundamental differences that only occasionally translate into inconveniences. Minor, trivial stuff that only turn out to be a big deal once all involved parties have noticed and started paying attention to the small hole that's slowly, secretly been fucking over their sailboat, this entire time.

“That sucks, man,” Bighead says, giving Richard a single sympathetic pat on the back.

_Stellar observation_ , Richard thinks.

“No offense, Richard, but we’re all collectively kind of amazed that this has gone on for as long as it has,” Erlich says, in the middle of rolling up a three-skinner. He motions for Bighead to pass him the lighter on the table. “Partly because Jared’s weird but also because you’re… y’know.”

Richard nods, accepting whatever criticism Erlich’s coated under the crust of an equivocally benign _y’know._  He looks up, thinking, _yeah, I suck, so that’s fair._

It’s dark out, and they’re sitting by Erlich’s poolside, he and the _original gang_. He’s high enough that he can casually bring up his issues, as it were, without feeling too self-conscious. The guys can toss him as many cents as they care to. He is prepared to cast them all right into the collective pool of _opinions he cannot bring himself to give a shit about, anyway_.  

“Have you ever considered that, like, maybe you did a thing?” Dinesh says. “I mean, no offense, you’re a nice guy and all, but you can be kind of a dick.”

Everyone else nods in agreement, as Richard looks on in mild horror.

“Maybe Jared’s just of the opinion that the institution of marriage is a bullshit construct designed by our oligarchical overlords to placate throngs of  _sheeple_ into a prescribed way of living,” Gilfoyle suggests. “By which I mean, the American dream, and some such.”

“No, that’s really just you who thinks that, Canadian prick,” Dinesh retorts. He picks up the lighter from the table and passes it to Richard.

“You know, marriage really is weird anyway,” Erlich says, starting an attempt at sagely advice that _could_  have been convincing, if he didn’t speak as sedately as he did. “You’re gonna put rings on to announce for the world to see that you’ve got this arrangement, right? Like, it’s a signal that you’re fucking. And, that you’re fucking exclusively.”

“Shit, it’s super weird when you put it that way,” Dinesh says.

“The American media really has fucked up everyone’s perception of relationships,” Gilfoyle mumbles. “All of these romcoms about crazed lunatics.”

“Hmm. You know, if you think about it, it is kind of weird, isn’t it?” Bighead says. “I mean, Jared just goes with whatever shit you wanna go with. So this must have, like, totally blindsided you, dude.”

“Yeah, it is kind of fucking weird that you can convince him to do anything,” Dinesh adds. 

“But, you know, people do stupid shit for people you're into,” Gilfoyle says. 

“Huh. Remember when that was, like, a joke?” Bighead says, squinting like he's trying to squeeze out a particular memory. “ _Oh, he'll do anything for you because he's totally into you._ ”

Richard takes a long drag from his joint, trying not to mind the twisting of his insides, regretting he ever brought any of this up at all.

“Oh my god, that’s it!” Erlich half yells and half yawns, dazed and delirious. “You’re… fuck, you’re uh…” he continues, as he whips out his phone, clicks through some apps, and scrolls. 

The scrolling goes on for a while. Dinesh and Gilfoyle roll their eyes, take a long drag and a swig of beer. Richard opens his mouth to comment, and Erlich raises a hand to shush him. 

“Emotionally manipulative!” Erlich finally says.

“Fuck,” Richard coughs, prickly, confused, and slightly, slightly disturbed. “What the hell does that even mean?”

“Yeah, I know, right? Women bring it up all the time. Monica, Carla, CJ, motherfucking Laurie Bream,” Erlich says, going through a list of possibly all the women he’s ever met, until Richard has to put two hands up to signal _yeah, we get it._  

“Fucking touchy,” Erlich continues. “Anyway, it’s like when you make someone feel like you owe them shit because you did a bunch of stuff for them.”

“Huh, I could have sworn that was more like when someone’s going through some stuff and you’re, like, pretending it’s not a big deal, but it is?” Bighead half-contributes and half-asks.

“Nah, I think it’s like when you act a certain way to get what you want out of somebody,” Dinesh chimes in.

“Hmm, emotional manipulation aside, it’s really curious that there’s been an obvious unbalanced power dynamic from the beginning,” Gilfoyle states plainly. “Since, y’know, he works for you and whatnot.”

Richard stares at them all, aghast, feeling abruptly guilty. He excuses himself, gets up, spins around, and tries to concentrate most of his attention on the light dancing in the pool. His eyes trace the path of white lines that ripple and beat over a fluorescent blue field, smooth and fluid and slightly nauseating. It is quite possible that he has not actually noticed some striking character flaws, on his part.

He kicks his shoes off, rolls his pants up, and sits by the pool. He grips at the gutter as he attempts to steady his breathing.  _One, one two three._ He desperately wants to believe that he means well, has always meant well, and that the well-meaningness of it all was, somehow, easily understood, despite his inability to articulate it. _Two, one two three._ Everything they’ve all just said has some grain of truth in them.  _Three, one two three._  Well, fuck it. He’s an idiot.

When he snaps out of his daze, he realizes that everyone else has moved over to the pool gutter as well. Bighead hovers close by and gives him a second sympathetic pat on the back. Dinesh and Gilfoyle move the chairs closer to the pool.Erlich pushes a bottle of beer into his hovering right hand, and he very nearly drops it into the pool.

“Has anybody told you that you can get, like, really dramatic over totally fixable stuff?” Bighead says, cringing a bit as he scoots over to the gutter. “Dude.”

 

* * *

 

The day gets dark just as the California Zephyr crosses over into Nevada. It’ll take another two days for the train to reach the very end of its inter-coastal route. Jared shuffles a few cards in his hands as he watches the sun sink under the horizon.

Another day gone. _Yup._ Another day of capitulating to the whims of whatever force has been propelling his life into the many, many trajectories it has taken. Part of him, instinctively, will not resist any acting force, regardless of intent. Yes, even the harmful ones, even the well-meaning ones, even the incidental ones, but mostly because he’s never really had much of a choice. He can adjust. He can adjust because he _must_ adjust, his own capacities be damned. Anyway, he can put all of that on the back-burner. He can stuff all of his concerns into a box and shelve them. He can make it so that they never, ever have to see the light of day. He can set aside fulfillment, or personal satisfaction, conveniences, indulgences, anything that can wait. He can postpone crying, any form of alleviation, any healthy responses to torment, sweep them up, stuff them in a box, shelve the box and forget about it. He can make it so that his life is fine. It's been a good life, all he has to do is believe it. And so, he has.

That must be it, he thinks. That must be why the first time life throws him a bone, and he decides that maybe, just once, he can have this one thing —  _just one thing_  — it gets out of hand. And before he knows it, one thing turns into another thing, and then another thing, until all the bones have somehow flocked together, shocked somehow into becoming a living, breathing thing. And before he knows it, he's thrown the living, breathing thing into a box with a flask of poison and a radioactive substance with a scheduled date of decay, and if he keeps the living, breathing thing in the box, something terrible is going to happen to it.

Part of him can’t help but feel proud. He’s proud of the fact that he’s gotten as far as he has.

He checks his watch.

It’s not that, until the letters came in, death had been far from his mind. He grew up cataloguing a list of all the ways he could have possibly died, in the different homes he’s lived, with the different conditions he’s endured, from overpopulated households, to creaky boats, to shipping crates, to self-driving cars and garages. He considers how fragile the human body can be, considers all the different ways the natural world could trigger a sequence of deathly reactions to any vulnerable point in his hypersensitive shell of a body, all the tiny accidents that could render his breathing to nil, his habitual neglect of supposedly superficial medical concerns that could potentially snowball into something fatal, the escalating rate of gun-linked casualties immediately following the turnover to the 2020 administration.

Jared considers that perhaps he still would have chosen all of this, anyway, even without having been put under the pressure of  having to cram as many life experiences as he could into a mercilessly tight deadline. Every version of his life, he realizes, all converges into a single point: _he’s going to die, anyway_. It’s difficult to explain why he feels directly responsible for _this_. _This_ being, stringing one Richard Hendricks along, into his perpetual disaster of an existence, and somehow _unintentionally_ cultivating a dynamic of unhealthy emotional dependency to the point of helplessness, upon separation. No, it wasn't completely unintentional. He has welcomed it. He has more than enabled it. There's no point denying that some ugly part of him — the part that craves the feeling of being constantly needed — has slightly enjoyed the codependency. No. More than slightly. No, that's not quite right.

God help him, he loved it.  _What an awful thing to covet._

He looks out the window, into the dark blur of tree lines rolling out as the train pulls further away from California. He counts on the last few months — the long stretches of silence, declining nights out, distancing himself somewhat — that he’s somehow been cruel enough that Richard will appreciate his abrupt exit. And then, he imagines Richard moving on, and maybe forgiving him for the mess he's made. Maybe. Somehow.

And then, he just hopes. Hope lumped in with despair, fraught and aching and ardent. Part of him hopes that maybe Richard is right. Maybe it isn’t real. He won’t die. At least, not _then_. Part of him hopes that one day, he can come back. He can come back and he can apologize. And he’ll be better. And they’ll both be better people. And it’ll all be fine.

He closes his eyes and hopes.

He’s read about the human body overcoming impossible odds — from the Paralympics, to lone survivors found weeks after a disaster, to terminal cancer spontaneously going into remission, to families uprooting themselves from their war-torn homelands and eventually finding greener pastures, to overcoming the life he has lived, being the people he has had to become, from constantly capitulating to the whims of some higher power, until he’s finally, finally wrested himself free from a life of benign deference, a life of allowing himself to be the tool of unconscionably exploitative institutions.

He thinks of the snow falling over Tulsa in the winter, Richard taking him to every place that used to fill him with dread. Awful, painful, harsh places, softer under the ice, mellowed, given time, distance. He remembers the two of them looking out at the stretch of it all. Richard’s grip on his hand getting tighter. Walking on. Moving forward.

_I used to hate it here. Now, I look at it and I don’t know if I’m still angry. It’s been a while. I don’t know. I’m not so sure._

_It’s silly, but I can’t help but love it._

_Yeah, Jared. That’s… that’s silly._

_I know. Is it terrible? It's silly, but it made you who you are. And I love you. So, I love it._

He thinks of the water running through the Mississippi river getting in his lungs, being lifted out of the water. How much heavier the air feels the moment he’s shocked back into life. He remembers desperately stuttering an apology to his aunt. Getting shuffled into the system.

_What’re you doing, boy? Wanna kill yourself?_

_I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry._

_Boy, what's wrong with you? Gonna end up like your ma._

_Please don't say that. She didn't. Don't say that._  

He remembers taking one last look at the sky. Diving down into the water without any intention of coming back up.

There’s a buzz from the inside pocket of his jacket. He reaches in and pulls out his phone. He clicks it mute,turns it face down, sets it on the empty seat beside him.

He looks out the window. There's a muffled buzz in the air, and his ears can't quite it tune out. He closes his eyes and calls it a day.

 

* * *

 

Is it late? It must be late. The sun is out of sight, and somebody’s killed the lights in the hall, and it’s quiet. It’s so quiet he can hear the deep hum of the central air conditioning. The compound is empty and he can hear the leaves outside outside rustling in the cool evening breeze. 

Richard looks up. The green digits blinking on his wall spell it out for him — 9:13pm. Maybe he should pack up. He drops his head back on his knees.

He has his head in his hands, shoes off, socked feet on the edge of his seat, knees folded and tucked into his chest, phone buzzing on the table. When the buzzing tapers out, no response, he breathes and waits for his head to stop spinning.

There’s a knock on his door and he falls off his chair, falls face first onto the rough cement floor. The door opens before he can even manage to pull himself together. He winces as he looks up and sees Monica wincing back at him.

“Uh… is this a bad time?” Monica asks, sounding inconvenienced.

“No, it’s fine. I’m fine,” Richard mumbles as he props himself up on his chair. The seat swivels and knocks him over, leaving him right back where he started.

He manages to get up, after some effort.

“What is it?” He finally says.

“Yeah, I just reviewed the new DDM Jared sent over and wanted to check in, but he wasn’t around. I don't think he’s getting my calls?” Monica says, hurriedly, waving a thin green tablet as she speaks. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Richard gives her an awkward nod. Monica frowns, lips pursed in a tight line. She tucks the tablet under her arm.

“If you’re sure. Anyway, where is he?” She asks again.

Richard frowns. He hangs his head as he tries to manage the interior mayhem ravaging his insides, without his consent. A laugh comes out of him. A laugh that turns into a sob. _God, get a grip, Hendricks._

He turns away and goes quiet.

“I don’t know where Jared is, Monica,” Richard whispers, with a shrug. “I don’t know.”

“You guys okay?” Monica inquires, in high-pitched concern.

“I don’t know,” Richard repeats, barely audible.

He looks out at the view outside, the purple glow of the city, the scattered lights, and a bit of it reminds him of the first time he sees aurora borealis, not on a TV or a computer screen, but _there_ right above him — dancing and flaring, bright and wild, unearthly and even stranger for its closeness. Untouchable. But anyway, none of that matters right now. He shakes his head, trying to snap out of his daze.

When he comes to, Monica has crossed over to where he’s idling, hastily dragging a finger up her tablet screen, again and again. She shoves it into Richard’s hands. He almost drops it.

“This is so dumb, and don’t do anything stupid, but if you wanna check if he’s okay, you can,” she says.

Richard checks the screen. The North American map, sectioned and marked, with scattered green data points all over, spots all over and throngs in California, Florida, and New York. He clicks through the users and searches for a specific data point. The red points disappear, replaced by a single green pin in the middle, slowly moving eastward.

“I thought we got rid of God View,” Richard mutters as he tries to guess where the pin is going.

“Like I said, don’t do anything stupid,” Monica reiterates.

“Is he going to Illinois?” Richard says, mostly to himself.

“Richard, are you listening to me?” Monica yells, nearly thwacking him in the head. She hovers beside Richard and tilts her head as she considers the green pin in the middle of the North American map.

“Huh. I’m… I’m sorry.” Monica mumbles, a little apologetically. She squeezes a hand on his shoulder.

Richard shakes his head and sighs. He looks out the window again. He clicks the tablet shut and passes it back. “Nothing stupid,” he mutters. “Promise.” 

Unsurprisingly, all the details have been handled. Of course they've been handled. _Of course._ He comes home and finds a manila file with all the paperwork accomplished: a letter of resignation that only needs his and Monica’s signature, a notarized deed of absolute sale of shares owned by one Donald Dunn, credit cards from the company accounts, joint accounts, et cetera, et cetera. Richard tips the envelope over, sticks his hand in and tries to fish out  _something else_. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. A note, maybe. There’s nothing else in there.

 

* * *

 

Jared remembers the exact moment he realized something had shifted. That things were different. That maybe he could have more than he signed on for. The year was 2015. Pied Piper was, once again, on the verge of ceasing to _be_. The servers running in the garage, the California heat, and the tight walls all swell and turn the air around into a positively blistering hell. Everything was going horribly, and he’s somehow managed to make it both better _and_  worse.

He grins as he leans in and whispers, “Richard… we have a secret.”

He knows what it sounds like. That he’s shamelessly delighted despite the horribleness of it all. The horribleness of what they’re going through. What they’ll have to face. What he’ll have to face, for prolonging a ruse as daftly as he had. Paying the piper, as it were. For some reason, at that very moment, he doesn’t care. If this thing they’ve thrown their lives away for, if that goes away, for some reason, at that moment, he doesn’t care.

Richard laughs, possibly despite himself. He laughs and _that’s it._  He laughs and somehow they end up sitting at the edge of his high loft bed, legs dangling out, trying to talk about other things. Trying to distract themselves from everything else. The real world. Pressing responsibilities. Anything that needed any sort of work of any nature. The ceaseless unease over anything uncertain. Anything in the distant future. Anything they could delay.

“You grew up in Chicago?” Richard asks, squinting like he’s straining to picture it in his head.

“Mm-hmm. Well, I moved quite often, but I lived there the longest. First with mom. Then, for a year, with Mary and Margaret and Lawrence and Mitch. And my Aunt Amy. The cats…” he says, raising a finger for each new character he conjures from the cast of his strange life.

Richard lies back on the bed and waits for him to follow suit. His head almost bumps the wall again, and he pushes against it and ends up lying on his side, facing Richard. Watching him stare intently at the ceiling, like he’s trying to see right through it.

“What was it like?” Richard asks. 

He tells Richard about Josie Dunn and their cramped apartment in Chicago. The paint chipping in the corners of the door to his room, as she carves in every inch he’s grown, swearing if he doesn’t stop growing, one day she’ll be scratching at the lintel. Black and white ivory keys that twinkle at Josie’s light touch. Playing Ellington softly, in the higher octaves, a sound like a gentle tide pulling him to the edge of sleep. He tells Richard that on one night — a night like any other, except for a storm rattling the windows and the lights browned out — he sleeps in Josie’s arms. He tells him that, on that night, Josie slept for good.

He doesn’t tell Richard that Josie was always half awake, barely present, eyes always drifting skyward, fingers clawing at the skin over her neck, nails picking it red and raw. He doesn’t tell him that Josie barely spoke, slept long hours in the day. He doesn’t tell him that Josie often spoke to herself, soundless and rasping, and that when she played the piano, she crooned and her voice was always breaking. He tells Richard that he loved his mother and he would have gladly taken care of her forever, as distant as she was, always threatening to float away from his grasp. He doesn’t tell Richard about the pills he finds when he gathers all their things.

And they keep coming back. And every time, he says something new — a little bit more about himself, from strange things, to wonderful things, to embarrassing things. He talks to Richard the way his mother used to play the piano for him. 

He tells Richard about a park north of Savanna, where he’d gone to camp a few times. Watching with envy and longing as the nighthawks and the swallows and the flycatchers swoop in and out as they please. Watching the way the yellow finches twist their legs and their backs as they snap sticks off the marsh to build their nests. Swimming in the spot where the Apple and the Mississippi rivers meet. Floating on his back, in the water, with coins of light shining through the trees and getting in his eyes. He tells Richard that that was probably the last time his life felt simple, like there wasn’t any weight pressing him down. And that it’s strange, but that’s what it feels like, just talking, here on their backs on a small loft bed. _As silly as it sounds._

He listens to Richard talk about Tulsa like he hates it and misses it at the same time. Catherine and Harold Hendricks and their dog, Maple. Shutting himself in his room for full weekends at a time, learning Ruby on Rails and Java and Django, how funny it is that his room back at home almost looks like it was obsessively coded and sorted and compiled through an interface, and  _maybe one day you’ll see it, Jared, it’s upsetting is what it is. God why was I like that?_

Richard recites long sections off of The Hobbit and Stranger in a Strange Land — just off the top of his head — immediately apologizing, because he didn’t mean to show off, he just wanted to demonstrate the _utter weirdness_  of having to tide through a panic attack. Having to wait and wait, having to push through and out, and trying not drown in it completely.

He listens to Richard talk about how silly it is that he can parse and deconstruct software like it’s nothing, but he’ll never get people, it’s hopeless, he’s hopeless, and he’s so glad he has other people around, and _how you all manage to stand me, I’ll never understand, but I’m grateful, I really am._ And somehow he finds himself putting his hand over Richard’s, and somehow feeling shocked and overwhelmed and confused that Richard lets it stay there.

But that was a while back. Some other person’s life, maybe.

It’s there in the back of his head as he types up another email in his laptop, as he works on another consultation. The apartment he’s been Airbnb-ing is small and austere, and everything in it is compact. Modular sofa, modular closet space, modular shelves, a kitchen with a small square island that pulls out into a six-seater table. 

It’s a Monday and his mail’s just come in from the building administration. He asks  the doorman if anybody saw anything, and the doorman gives him a polite smile, benign and blank, saying, “no, but the next chance I get, I’ll let you know.” It’s the exact same line the doorman’s been saying for the last eight months. 

He opens the envelope, still sealed in wax, two wheels interlocked with an eye in the middle pressed into the coating. The note inside is just as frustrating and vague as ever.

 

_Head’s up!_

 

He shrugs and sets it down, takes his phone from his pocket and takes a photo of it. Then, he slips it in a shelf with the rest of the notes, comes back to fold his laptop shut, steps outside, and locks the door behind him.

Jared goes about his day, completely unaware of the Code Conference being set up four kilometers away.

 

* * *

 

It’s been eight months. Eight months since the green pin blinking in the middle of Monica’s green tablet. No, Richard doesn’t check, doesn’t let himself see if it does end up moving all the way to Chicago. But he’s here anyway. He’s here for a conference, nothing else. No, he didn’t pick it out, didn’t suggest it, of course he didn’t, because that’s ridiculous. Besides, they’ve probably planned this out maybe a year in advance. 

He has no idea why he finds himself hanging out on the street every time he can spare an hour or so, and he’s not sure why he can’t help but look out every window, every corner, always backtracking his steps, unintentionally tailing every tall, slight-framed, pale, dark-haired man he spots. No, he doesn’t know why he does that.

It’s been eight months.

Richard’s panel is today and he should be used to it, but he’s nervous as always, like it’s all still new to him. He wakes up early, gets dressed early, and steps out far too early. He has six hours to kill, so he saunters around a few blocks, walks and walks until greens start to bleed into the concrete, until he’s suddenly in the middle of Millennium Park, staring right up at a funhouse-twisted version of himself reflected on the curved edges of a massive silver lump of a sculpture, just as floating and aimless as he is. He stares up at it — a warped liquid mercury ellipse suspended and shoved into a park, a public spectacle. A distraction. He does what everyone's supposed to do in its presence, so he looks up and  _stares_. He huffs at it, frowning as he thinks that it's funny, this strange thing came here all the way from California, too, and it looks strange and out of place but it's here anyway.  _Yeah, I feel that_ , he thinks at it.

He shakes his head, snaps out of it, and walks some more.

He walks and walks, feeling the whole weight of his body rolling forward on the ball of a single foot, one step after another, every conscious step dissolving into a mechanical rhythm, steady and distracting, moving like he’s a wheel in a cog in a colossal machine, a single cell embedded in the palm of a hand, being moved along with purpose, never knowing its part as the hand swipes over the world and fashions it into some grand design. And there he is, aimless, mindless, oblivious, moving along, being moved without his consent, to just _wherever_.

At least, he imagines it must have been that way. Something must have been propelling him. Because he’s here in another state, crossing an unfamiliar street, and he thinks he hears a familiar voice calling out his name.

“Richard,” he hears someone calling again. A familiar croak, the tail of it tilting into a question like it’s unsure but hoping — desperately hoping. 

Richard spins around so quickly he almost falls over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jared's description of a box and the poison and the radioactive trigger and the living breathing thing, comes from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment — something Dinesh and Gilfoyle introduce him to.
> 
> God View is a user-tracking feature that Uber allegedly introduced and exploited for creepy stalking purposes. Richard uses it in canon to figure out who's been using the Pied Piper beta.


	4. The elements of disbelief are very strong in the morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This has all been so strange.

If time were to stretch and stretch until it strained so much it threatened to snap, this is how it might look like. Bodies suspended like stringed marionettes. The hollow sound of a low, sustained buzz. Dust frozen in the air. Conversely, the anxiety of temporal exigencies seem to press large over the whole of it, somehow stronger, irrepressible, rather than thinning out in its stasis. Somehow, it has become impossible to move. And yet, somehow, everything feels much, much more urgent. 

It was almost as if time had decided to distribute itself inequitably in the span of eight months. A  small patch awarded to nearly the whole of it, and then the rest of it spread out to a single moment. As if one were to hurtle down a ravine — swiftly, thoughtlessly, helplessly — only to find, inches from impact, time decelerating without warning. The world moving frustratingly, unreasonably, agonizingly slow.

The soles of someone's shoes audibly crunch on the pavement as he lifts his heavy feet, walking a length of concrete arches that seem to go on until forever. His heartbeats grow farther apart, knocking heavier. His mind — untouched by this paralysis, plagued with unease — imagines that the air is thinning, each molecule trapped in a standstill. Somehow, he feels like he's suffocating.

Jared belatedly realizes that something about this doesn't make sense.

There _might_  be something absurd about suddenly following a person who resembles a certain somebody he'd once dropped his exhaustively constructed life for, traded in for a life that ran like a sustained shock of memory — a refinement of his earliest impressions of _being._  A life that moved like an upwelling of all the childhood comforts and fears that he thought he’d long shoved under the pressure of a scrupulous routine and a benign disposition. A life of mostly bliss, if one ignored the trouble that loomed like a menace over the stretch of it. A trouble that he, unfortunately, could neither ignore nor confront. And yet he’s here, anyway, urgently chasing back a life he abruptly dropped because he simply _couldn’t handle it_.

“Richard?” Jared says, like he has to spit it out.  

When the person turns to face him, and he sees that it really is Richard, he’s dumbstruck. The cache of words forming in his mind begin to bleed into each other. Any sound thought he might have intended to declare must have thinned out on the way over. So, Jared settles for uttering the only word he can manage to say, with all the clarity and complexity he can bring to bear.

“Hi.”

The expression on Richard’s face shifts from shocked to relieved to mildly upset. His mouth is trembling like he’s restraining himself from speaking too abruptly.

“Can we talk?” Jared asks, quiet and a little despairing.

Richard says nothing, only holding his gaze. 

Jared _wants_  to explain. He’s aware any explanation is going to ring hollow, especially when it’s eight months overdue, but here they are. He _needs_ to explain.

“I…I…” he starts. His mouth has gotten dry.

He tries again. _Nothing._  

“You left,” Richard suddenly says, breathlessly, like the realization’s only hit him. Like he still can’t believe it.

Jared instinctively opens his mouth to respond, but thinks better of it and bites his lip instead of muttering some thin defense.

“I don’t know what I did,” Richard says, quietly. Of course he thinks it’s his fault. _Of course he does._

“I…” Jared tries again. He shakes his head and squeezes his eyes shut. “You…” he croaks, letting the rest of his words just hang in the air. 

Richard looks at the pavement, intently. 

“I…” Jared tries again.

“Why?” Richard inquires _and_ demands. 

What’s he supposed to say?  _Did you know that I ended up in the foster system because the person raising me killed herself?_ _Do you know what it’s like to have to just live with it? Have you noticed that_ _I turned myself into a crutch for you? Did you know that I did it so that you’d never leave? That I've been this way with everyone, for most of my life? It’s manipulative. It’s stupid. It’s cruel and inconsiderate. And then with you. I knew I was going to disappear one day, this whole time, and I let this all happen anyway._

“I don’t know,” Jared says.

“You don’t know?”

It’s not the truth, but he doesn’t know what else to say. He shakes his head.

Richard turns around, looks up. “Fuck you,” he says, soundlessly.

Jared watches as Richard’s shoulders start to shake.

“I’m sorry,” Jared says. He wrings through the twisted coils of his nerves as he stutters out an explanation. “I thought if you hated me it would’ve been easier.”

Richard stays put and mutters, “well, I don’t fucking hate you, so good job.”  

“I was going to leave anyway,” he stresses.

“You don’t fucking know that,” Richard sobs out. “And I never fucking cared.”

“That’s not true.”

He can’t tell if Richard is laughing or sobbing. “I could try,” he whispers, with a tone of unmistakeable despair.

Jared squeezes his eyes shut. He tries to think of something to say. Something that isn’t a flat and tired apology. Something that doesn’t sound like an excuse. Something that doesn’t sound contrived.

Nothing’s coming to him. It’s awful. 

“Head’s up!” Somebody yells from afar.

Then, a thud. A crack.

Jared snaps his eyes open. 

Richard is on the floor, unconscious.

Jared takes out his phone and rings for an ambulance. In the back of his mind, he considers the strange ways an emergency can seemingly shift the world, in scale, in motion, in balance.

This has all been so strange.

 

* * *

 

This is a dream. Obviously. Because it’s already happened.

Maybe he’s just high. 

Richard stumbles out of Bighead’s car with his hair and his clothes still slightly damp from Dinesh and Gilfoyle kicking him into Erlich’s pool. Slightly dazed and buzzed, but everything's tapering off. He just has to wait it out. Wait so that he doesn’t walk in a mess.

The light in the hallway glares purple at the fringes. His nerves, which have been on overdrive for the better part of a week, have now blunted. He is just _so ready_  to get home and just _fix everything._  All the insidious damage he’s been dealing, just by being the way that he is. 

He bangs his head on the door as he tries to reach for the handle,slumps on the doorframe as he fishes for his keys in his back pocket. He hasn’t even aligned the right key into the top socket yet, but somehow he finds himself falling flat on his face, right on the welcome mat. Either it's gotten really soft, or his senses are on overdrive.

No. They can’t be, because he looks up and suddenly he’s blind.

Richard squints at the ceiling, wondering why the room’s gotten dark. His vision slowly comes into focus and no, the lights haven’t dimmed, Jared is just crouched over him, looking disconcertingly concerned.

“You bumped into the door about ten minutes ago,” Jared points out, sounding mildly distressed.

 _I’m sorry,_  Richard really wants to say, posthaste.

“I’m a moron,” he wheezes out instead.

“I’d challenge your assertion but I can see you’ve built a strong case in your favor,” Jared responds, flatly. He holds his hand out.

“Yep,” Richard says, unequivocally, taking the hand and wondering if what he just heard was a joke or a sincere appraisal.

He lets Jared haul him into bed. He would help, he really would, but somehow his bones have chosen this particular moment to turn into jelly. The bed is even softer than the mat, soft enough that he could sink in it and, ideally, never come back up. Jared’s fingers start combing through his hair. For some reason, he can’t keep his eyes open.

He hears Jared kick off his slippers and climb into bed. He feels arms wrapping around his waist, and all the air gets sucked out of the room. He locks his fingers into the hands wrapped around him. His mind starts drifting elsewhere.

And, because it’s a dream, the room gets sucked into a whorl of light and color.

When he opens his eyes, they’re in his room in Tulsa, and he knows exactly when this was. Christmas, 2017. Tucked under neat white sheets in his neat white bed, surrounded by stacks of polypropylene cases and a white desk with a white System76, white snow falling outside. He thinks, _was this room ever this white?_  They’re both in white, it’s weird.

If he’s ever questioned the reality he’s presented, it’s because nothing’s ever lived up to the hype of being _worth it_. But then, he feels the arms around his chest hugging him tighter, his legs curling to fit two bodies in the space of his compact twin bed. And then he thinks, if this is the reality he’s getting, he’ll gladly accept it.

The air is crisp and frigid. All he can hear is the both of them breathing. Richard flips over and buries his face into the crook of Jared’s neck.

This is a dream, obviously. Because he’s already had this conversation. 

“It’s weird. I’m still a little embarrassed. You’re seeing all of this.” He whispers.

“All of what?” Jared responds, softly, half-asleep.  

“The way I am, I guess. I’m fucking mess.” 

“You’re not.” Jared says, as emphatically as he can at the lowest volume.

“You’re a moron.”

“You know, it’s funny. I was about to call you the same thing.”

Richard opens his eyes. Immediately he spots a mole on Jared’s collarbone that he’s never noticed before. And it’s still weird that he can get close enough to see it practically everyday. And it’s weird that he’s gone from looking at a small dot on a pale sheet to thinking about the inexhaustible encounters he’s been having with this weird body wrapped around him. How there’s always something new.

Just as Richard’s about to sink into sleep, he hears Jared whisper, “I’m sorry I'll have to leave so soon.”

He remembers this part. Specifically, he remembers what he actually said. _It’s not going to happen_. A firm rejection. Conviction he cannot possibly substantiate. Denial, at the core of it. But now, his mind is teetering, threatening to pivot right over the fulcrum. _It’s safer to assume it’s true_ , says a voice in his head.

And if it is, what then?

The business of finality is too fraught for him to even begin to consider. And yet somehow, he can sense a stain on the back of his mind. A dream that it had already happened. That, in some other version of the narrative of his life, he’d already been moved. He’d already become, from the kind of person who crawled under the pressure of his own private distress, to somebody lifted up and allowed to see the world through a clearer heart and a clearer mind, to somebody abandoned and left to stand on his own.

And it was strange. And it was sublime. And it was cruel. But, it was there. The point is, it was there.

He thinks about that line. The one everyone says. _Better to have loved and lost._ That’s the one. God, is it? Really? Who knows?

“It’ll be fine,” Richard says, in this version of events, like a guarantee.He tries to mean it. He can’t be certain. But he can try.

Jared chuckles and his breath tickles at the back of his neck.

Richard wants to substantiate this assertion. He wants to, for once in his goddamned life, be the person comforting, and not the person who _needs_  comfort. But anything he might have been able to say has taken on a weight and shape of its own. Now it’s all swimming out of his eyes. 

Now the stupid pillow is wet. God, he needs to get a grip.

Come on. _Come on._

“Come on. It’ll be fine,” he says again. Maybe more for himself.

“I hope so.”

“I mean, so what, right?”

“Richard…”

“It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. I mean it.”

“I believe you.”

And the room spins. Of course. It’s a dream. He’ll tell Jared later. He will.

He feels a pull at the fringes of his mind, loosening the knots of his mind, moving from meditation to blankness. The room is gone, only the sensation of touch left to linger in its wake.

Then, there’s a click. Two clicks. A beep. Steady beeping. The air gets colder. Somehow, the whiteness of the room begins to sneak into his eyes.

Richard thinks he hears wheels rolling across the tiles outside. A steady beeping. Two people having a conversation. He thinks it’s strange but doesn’t give it much thought. He thinks he hears Jared’s voice coming from outside, which is weird because he’s right here, he knows, because he’s wrapped around him. But the voice keeps on speaking, so he strains his neck to get close enough to hear.

 

* * *

 

 _There was this thing that happened in Palisades Park that I never really got around to telling you about. I hope you can hear me now. I don't think I can watch you listen to this. It’s embarrassing._  

_So, Aunt Amy sent me to a Methodist camp there because she thought it would be good. I know. Well, I get it. I mean, after mom. And it was good, at first. As far as I can recall. No, it was good. It was simple and it was distracting._

_And all the birds in the sky…_

_Well, you can just imagine. Anyway._

_One day I just, well. I dove into the Mississippi River. And I thought to myself, I’m just going to stay under. Nothing preconceived. I just hit the water, and felt like it. Never coming up again. Okay, no. That’s a lie. Mm-hmm, no good. I’m sorry._

_I thought about disappearing for a long time. A really long time. I just didn’t want to be anymore. Just. I didn’t. And then, well, a door opened. And I tried. I really tried. Probably the hardest I’ve ever tried. Ever, in my life. And I almost did. Really, I almost did. Sometimes I think I’m so pale because I left a bit of myself there. Like the water practically washed all of the pigment off me._

_Mm-hmm, I know. Silly. Anyway._

_Then I got scooped up. Then I was breathing again. Then Aunt Amy sent me away._  

 _No, wait._ _I think I just painted a cruel picture of Aunt Amy. That’s unfair._ _She tried her best. She meant well. Everyone always meant well. She didn’t just send me away because I, you know. Tried to. Well._ _That._

_Mom did the same thing and, she… She finished the job. And neither of us knew how to handle it. And it bothers me, thinking you might have to… I mean. Not just that part, of course. But it’s something that I… I don’t know. It’s just._

_Gosh, that was incoherent._ _Sorry about that._

_Like I said, it’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed. I’ve never actually said any of this out loud before. So…_

_I’ll tell you all of it, later. When you’re up, I mean._

 

* * *

 

Jared has always been somewhat terrified of hospitals. The cool, sterile, dry air. The faint whirs and clicks and beeps of machinery. Hushed voices and footsteps. Every activity given the weight of urgency. Always, always somehow rushing. Distressed. Grave inquiries. _Will he be okay? How long? What’s going to happen to him? Is it fine? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?_

It’s been exhausting. So, he sleeps.

And then his eyes snap open.

He wakes up from the shock of the curtain’s plastic hoops swiftly scraping into the metal rack. He blinks his eyes and tries to sit up on his chair, but immediately cowers down instead, because somebody’s just barged in.

“What the fuck?” Erlich yells.

“I can explain,” Jared rasps.

Before he can say anything else, Erlich holds a hand up to shush him. “No. There are a lot of things that I’ve been meaning to say to you, and I might as well get them out of the way now, before anything else,” he says, calmly. Suspiciously calm.

Jared stands up. He makes an attempt at displaying the comportment of somebody who has got his shit together. It probably isn’t working, so he just stares.

“Okay.” He says, cautiously.

Erlich laces his fingers together, cracks his knuckles. “I always thought you looked like the kind of guy who would purchase the services of an underaged Asian for pleasure,” he says.

“Uh,” Jared gulps. 

“You look like Rin Tin Tin's shaven, freakishly tall, loser brother.” 

“Erlich…”

“You look like the ghost of a person who died,became a zombie, took a look at his corpse in the mirror, and died again.”

“I get it.”

“Did you know that Wikipedia changed its entry on  _douchebag_ to a picture of Donald Trump holding a picture of you?” 

Jared squeezes his eyes shut and exhales sharply. “Are you done?” He whimpers.

“Yeah, I’m done, asshole.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I fucking bet.”

“I really am.” 

“Whatever,” Erlich whines, squeezing his temples with his fingers. He looks unbearably exhausted. “I had to freaking proxy for the panel thinking about this shit the whole time, so if you can't tell, I’m having a great day.”

Jared looks down and says nothing. 

“Have you been in Chicago this whole fucking time?” 

He tries to laugh away his discomfort. “Uh. Yeah?”

“Is he dying?” 

“No.”

“You gonna fuck off again?”

“No.”

Erlich looks away. To Richard, to the floor, to the curtains, back to him. He nods. “Good, because it’s been really weird,” he says.

Erlich puts a hand on Jared’s shoulder, and Jared recoils, stunned and moved and slightly, slightly terrified.

“I mean, you probably had your reasons but, y’know. He’s an idiot. You’re an idiot. Idiots deserve to get lumped in groups to spare the rest of us. So, I'm glad. For you two, I mean.”

Jared exhales out the surplus of terror throttling his insides. He smiles, genuinely delighted. “Thank you,” he says. 

Erlich frowns at him and shrugs. The hospital whirs along. Click, click, click. Tap, tap, tap. Beep, beep, beep. Somebody’s uncontainable sobbing, from the behind the curtain.

“How’s he been?” Jared asks.

“Weird. Really weird. You broke a good man, Jared.” 

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah, well… it wasn’t all bad. Just weird.”

Jared smiles and says nothing more.

Erlich circles the bed, pulls out the chair flanking the other side, and slumps onto it. “So, I’ve got time to kill,” he says.

They sit in companionable silence for the better part of two hours. Erlich scrolls through his phone. Jared looks up at the ceiling, lightly taps at the bed’s steel side rails. Hospitals are cold and strange and upsetting. He very nearly drifts back to sleep.

Jared feels a light tap on the back of his hand. He opens his eyes.

“Hi,” Richard says.

Before Jared can respond, Erlich gets up and bangs at the rails. “Fucking finally,” he groans.

 

* * *

 

It’s been so weird, all of this. God, so weird. And wonderful. And awful. They have all this time together, now. It’s still not enough. But, it’s what he gets. Richard supposes he can’t complain. That he gets it at all is enough. It should be enough. Who is he to say what he deserves anyway? It’s got to be enough.

And it’s overwhelming. It is. God, it really is.

A world of impulse, of sincerity. Each moment granted its own weight to bear — dense and broad and significant. Every word exchanged charged with meaning, spoken with clarity, wrested of shame, no longer deviating. Always, always the clearest possible truth — the whole of it, with nothing left out. Work always led with a sharp sense of purpose — the best possible kind of thing, never rushing, never capitulating, never compromising, advantages never taken at the expense of the backs of the many. Slower work. A kinder world.

Any need for relief is always satisfied. Each kiss, each touch, each encounter spurred by urgency — always fraught with emotion, always intent, always meant with all the sincerity they’re able to muster.

Richard knows he’s going to miss it when it's over. All of it. Even the weird stuff. Even the embarrassing stuff. Even the stupid stuff. So, he takes what he can get, gives as much as he can. He wrings their lives for all they're worth, and yet somehow, they're inexhaustible. There’s still so much left. So much that the thought of it is unbearable.

And yet, sunken like an iceberg somewhere in the back of Richard’s mind, it still is difficult. He can’t help but look past the end of the stretch. A shadow looming behind a mountain. A locked door at the end of the hall. The closing of a chapter with a question mark. He tries to push past it. He promised he’ll be fine. So, he will be. He just has to try not to think of it.

It's difficult, but he’ll try.

The last notice comes in, and he shakes as Jared hands him the envelope to read. Letters in calligraphic loops, swimming around the page as if expressly designed to nauseate.

 

_Congratulations_ _and_ _our sincerest condolences._

No. No. It’s just. It’s not. It can’t be. He won’t believe it. He won’t let it. Richard impulsively grabs onto Jared’s wrist, and almost lets go when he feels him trembling. He lifts Jared’s wrist up and presses a kiss to the back of his hand. He closes his eyes and keeps his mouth there, until his hand slackens, until it goes from frigid to warm — a few fraught seconds that seem to stretch and stretch until they threaten to snap.

A wave comes over him, lurching heavy in his chest. Somehow, he recalls the feeling of witnessing the twist and curl of an unreachable light over a purple sky, years and years ago — something that had been self-evident to him, previously, yet still able to become even more elusive for its revelation. His grip on Jared’s wrist tightens. 

“I’m sorry I’ve tricked you into thinking I knew how to handle this,” Jared says, quietly, his voice quivering.

Richard takes his hand and says nothing. What is there to say, anyway? Somehow it feels like the whole force of the world is pressing heavily on their backs, down and down until they’re crawling.

But they have to stand. They have to. He has to.

“It’ll be fine,” Richard whispers. He means it. He’s going to try. He has to.

He takes Jared’s face in his hands and kisses him like a cool balm over bruised skin. Gently, deeply, thoroughly. Again and again. Like if he does this as slowly as possible, maybe everything else can slow down, too. Maybe.

And, because he can’t help himself, he holds on for dear life. Until they’re gasping. Until they’re aching. Until they’re exhausted. Until they’ve held onto each inch of each other. They shiver and they moan and wring their time for all it’s worth. Rushing, mad, nervous, desperate. Then, frustratingly, unreasonably, agonizingly slow. A sustained shock of memory, all the time that's passed fluxing into the present like coming home. Everything swelling in a furling and unfurling of the familiar and the new.

Richard wakes up just as it’s about to get dark. He looks around and considers all the details strewn about the life he’s lived so far, in slow drips, and great waves. The light that sneaks into the room is faint and waning, casting soft shadows to the walls that look like creatures in the middle of a deep and peaceful slumber. The bed is comfortable, the light is soft, the air is temperate. Gentle breaths tickling the back of his neck. Arms wrapped around his waist. All the signs that remind him that he regrets none of this. 

And yet somewhere, looming over the length of it, stands a bleak point somewhere in the weeks ahead. But that’s not on his mind. At least, not at this moment. He won’t allow it. Not when they’re here, bathed in a warm orange glow, and his mind is still pulling into shore, out from the daze of a dream, the elements of disbelief pulling strong from out of the fringes of a suspended moment of bliss.

Richard watches the clock on the wall. The minute hand moves.

He closes his eyes.


	5. Slowly, the heart breathes to music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything’s coming up blue in all the ways that make it wretched, yet Richard can’t shut his eyes.

Richard plays it out in his head again. Tries to make sure he gets it all exactly right. Tries to keep this one moment perfectly clear, crisp and spotless, forever preserved in the amber of his mind — every point, every second, every detail. From the way the dust rolls in the air to the chill in his toes, to the soft blur of the shadows on the walls, to the rustle of the leaves carried along by the evening breeze.

It’s dark. Nothing to see. A faint hint of blue from a hint of moonlight passing through the slats of the bedroom window. Richard pulls the blanket up to cover both occupants of the bed. Shield them away from some strange desolation. He’s aware that it’s futile. To shield anybody from the ravages of time, that’s a losing game. Time will always pass, as it must. But there’s nothing else to be done, so he doesn't care. He turns to his side, pushes back stray strands of hair from the face across his, making some attempt to fix the hair he mussed up from earlier. He thinks about the blueness of the room and the blueness of the eyes peering at him, hooded, sleepy, weary but calm, the blueness of a vast and yawning horizon — below, the inexhaustible sea, and above, the boundless sky. Everything’s blue overhead and blue underneath, and things don’t perceive their blueness, are just thrust into blueness without their consent, and right now everything’s coming up blue in all the ways that make it wretched, yet Richard can’t shut his eyes.

“I love you,” he says, like a desperate Hail Mary.

Like it’s going to do something.

Like something, somebody out there will take pity on them both.

Please. Please. 

_Please._

Jared says nothing, only smiling a melancholy smile. The one where his mouth and brows seem to disagree on which emotion to express. He closes his eyes, leans in and…

No, that's not what happened. Rewind.

Jared reaches over and swipes a thumb across his wet cheek.

Was that it? No. Not quite right. Richard remembers leaning in closer. That’s what happened.

Okay. Rewind.

Richard leans in. Jared reaches over, pulls Richard closer, swipes a thumb across his wet cheek and kisses him on the forehead.

"I love you," Jared whispers, and it sounds like the wind.

What did his voice sound like, again?

He tries to replay it. Blanket covering them both. Blue eyes. A tug on his cheek. Warm lips to his forehead.

“I love you,” Jared says, and it sounds cold and flat.

_He wouldn’t._

Rewind. “I love you,” Jared says, his voice trembling.

No, that's not right.

Rewind. “I love you,” he whispers, calm and measured.

No… why can’t he get it right?

Rewind. “I love you,” he says, uncertain.

Rewind. “I love you,” he says brightly, almost platitudinal.

Rewind. “I love you,” he gasps, like a moment of revelation.

Rewind. He says it again, heavy and low. Rewind. Upset. Rewind. Delighted. Rewind. Exhausted. Rewind. Disjointed. Rewind. Incoherent.

What did Jared's voice sound like? How did he say it? Why can’t he remember?

Rewind.

“I love you too. So, so much.”

It sounds like nothing. Static.

Richard squeezes his eyes tighter and tries to wring the memory out. He stretches his left hand out but all he feels are the floorboards.

 

* * *

 

There’s the details. All the tedious bureaucratic minutiae that condense a life into black and white matter. Bottom lines, property distribution, updated documents, updated statements. More papers to sign. Funeral arrangements. There’s the business of the things left behind. Clothes, shoes, books, sheets, files, hardware, music, souvenirs, certificates. An heirloom wristwatch with the name Josephine inscribed on the other side of the face. Richard puts it on and can’t help but check it, on impulse, every couple of hours.

There’s the replies to all the well-wishes. Phone calls to field. All rehearsed responses, carefully constructed, pleasantly benign, calm and reassuring, painfully performative. Exhausting to no end.

_Thank you for your sympathies, Laurie._

_Hi, Ron. Yes, it was… sudden. Yes, very young. No, it’s all right, just say it. Yeah, just send it over, I’ll sign it. I’m aware. I understand. I’m all right, thanks._

_No, Carla, there’s no need to worry. No, I’m okay. Yeah, I know. No, he probably didn’t mind, you really don’t have to apologize. No, I’m okay. Seriously, I’m okay._

_Russ, thanks for calling. Mm-hmm. Yup. Okay He… ugh, yeah sure. Sure. Thanks again. No, yeah, I’m fine._

_Thanks again for stopping over, Bighead. No, no, I’ll be okay. Dude, come on. You know me. I’ll be fine. No, that is not a lie. I don’t lie. Come on._

_I’m all right, Monica, I’ll just need some time off. Nothing stupid, I promise._

_Erlich, I know it’s okay to cry. Why wouldn’t I think so? No, don’t… could you please… okay, you can fuck off. No, sorry! I’m just… sorry. Sorry about that. I’m okay. Thanks. Could you not? But thanks._

_Mom, I really just need to be alone for a bit, but it’s all right, I’ll be fine, I promise. Tell dad not to worry? Thanks. Uh-huh. Okay. Of course I’ll be there._

_Gavin? Uh, it’s just weird, to be quite honest. I mean, you’re… what’s that? No, uh, forget it. Thanks for calling. Yeah, he was great. Absolutely. You’re right. I wouldn’t have been able to start any of it, you’re right — no, trust me, I know. What’s that? What? Why would you even imply… No, I didn’t seduce him into jumping ship! I’m hanging up._

_Thanks, you two. You don’t need to stop by. The place is kind of a mess. Embarrassing. Unlivable. I’m serious. No, I can take care of it. But thanks, guys. I’m fine. Don’t stop by. Thanks but you don’t have to. So, don’t. Just don’t. Please don’t._

The days rotate in disaffection. Bits of paper. The torpid air. Paint and disinfectant all over the condo, until every surface is burnt clean — small, smooth changes made to physically bifurcate a life from the flow of one topological structure into another. Windows shuttered. Glasses filled with the strain of some broad and nebulous grief, smashed and promptly swept out. Furniture rearranged. Boxes and boxes of old things filled. Hours passing long, tumid, unfocused.

What day is it?

Whatever.

It’s late now. He’s tired. The floor is fine.

Richard sleeps and dreams of snow. White puffs of fog curling in the space around him. Tulsa in the winter glowing with the light of some strange, new, foreign feeling. A swell of hope. Old pains carried away in the breeze. Crisp air trapping trees and concrete and brimstone and glass into something fragile and delicate, like veins on a leaf, cracking and falling apart. A kiss on his lips. A sudden breeze. Swallows fluttering overhead.

A still point in the turning world.

Then, the sky falls. It’s dark.

Somebody’s knocking, and it echoes in the cold air.

His eyes snap open.

He’s on the floor. It’s still late.

Somebody’s knocking on the front door, assertive and rapid, gradually growing louder. The sound of it coming into the bedroom is faint. A nag of a beat, displeased, insistent. The floorboards are chilly at this late hour. The whole space is thick with the sharp smell of fresh paint mixed with disinfectant. The room is practically spotless. To the corner, stacks of smooth, white polypropylene boxes, filled with old things. Outside, the knocking persists.

“Hey, Richard,” calls one voice.

“Richard, we know you’re in there,” calls another.

It’s Dinesh and Gilfoyle.

They can fuck off.

Richard is fine. He’s more than fine. His current state — splayed out on the cold, shiny floor — was done of his own accord, of sound mind and body, perfectly fine, absolutely no reason to worry. He’s fucking fine, so they can fuck off. He just needs some more goddamned time. He’ll be fine.

They’re still knocking.

Knocking even louder.

Banging.

“Richard, come on!”

They can really fuck off.

Richard lies on his back and looks up at the ceiling — at its large, white flatness. He sighs at it. The ceiling expresses no sympathy, unwavering in its indifference. A cold white plane with no mind, no memory, not a care in the world. Just a thing that happens to coexist with him in this strange dead space, mute and pallid and sterile.

He squeezes his eyes shut as the banging on the front door grows even louder, trying to breathe steadily as he steels himself.

_One, one two three. Two, one two three. Three, one two three._

Richard gets to the door, turns the knob, and the door swings open with a violent push.

“Shit!” He yells as he backs into the wall.

Dinesh and Gilfoyle muscle in and close the door behind them. They flank him in the middle of the hall, size him up from top to bottom and shake their heads, visibly chagrined.

“Look, we know this is a tough time and you’re still recovering and shit, but really, what you’re doing, this isn’t right,” Dinesh says.

“Here,” Gilfoyle says, shoving a steel vacuum cup in his hands.

Richard twists the lid open and squints at the contents.

“It’s tea, idiot,” Gilfoyle says.

Richard nods. He knows. He knows that it’s a particular kind of tea, and he can tell it’s been chosen deliberately. He remembers who used to get it for him whenever he’d be up at dawn for no particular reason, nothing more than some misplaced dread he can’t quite shake.

Richard cannot grasp why either of them thought this was a good idea. Stopping by. The tea. Stopping by with the tea. He’s not going to cry over fucking tea. He really isn’t. He won’t. Jesus, what’s wrong with him?

“Thanks,” he mutters, still absorbed by the movement of the leaves as he rocks the container back and forth, twisting everything in a gentle swirl.

He moves slowly into the living room and sits on the edge of the coffee table, still completely distracted by the tea. He thinks a question at it, as clearly as he can manage. The leaves reveal no answers, only moved by the pull of the water.

“Richard, I think it’s time we addressed the elephant in the room,” Gilfoyle says.

“You’re gonna to need to come back to the real world eventually,” Dinesh follows. 

Richard knows. He doesn’t need anybody telling him. That's obvious. He's going to have to live his life. Stop miserably cleaning the whole place until it burns down. Go back to work. Move on. Move forward.

 _One step at a time,_ some voice echoes, in the back of his mind.

Sure. Small steps. _Maybe look up from the tea, first._

“I knew it was going to happen,” he whispers.

“Huh?” Both reply, simultaneously.

“I just knew. I can’t explain how,” Richard lies. Somewhat. “I knew. I could’ve done something. It’s my fault,” he continues, not crying. He really isn’t. It sounds like it. It looks like it. But he really isn’t. 

“Okay man, it’s par for the course to rationalize shit that doesn’t make sense, but these things happen. There’s no need to take all the credit,” Gilfoyle says.

“No, it’s just… you don’t know,” Richard stammers. He drops the cup onto the table. “It’s…” He squeezes his eyes shut and exhales. It’s hopeless. What does it matter? What’s done is done.

“Never mind. Forget I said anything,” he says.

Richard turns his gaze to the window. The sky is gray. It’s not gray on his behalf. Not gray in solidarity. The color gray doesn’t comprehend its grayness. Just happens to be gray. Unfeeling. Unknowing. A swell of particulate matter floating by, unfettered by any human concerns.

Dinesh and Gilfoyle survey the room, one sweeping lateral glance. They look down, shrug, and sit on the floor.

“Your place is, like, super clean,” Dinesh observes, with an eyebrow raised.

Richard shrugs.

“To be quite honest, it’s at a level of clean that’s one-hundred percent disturbing,” Gilfoyle comments.

Richard rolls his eyes and tries not to mind the benign appraisal. A new layer of paint. Art taken down and hid. Furniture rearranged into uniformly segmented sections. Floors polished to a glassy sheen.

“Hey, seriously. You wanna talk about anything?” Dinesh offers.

“Nothing,” Richard simply replies.

“Nothing, as in, there’s nothing to talk about, or you’d rather not?” Gilfoyle inquires.

“Just. Y’know. Nothing.”

Richard watches the view outside. He concentrates on the dust hanging in the air and thinks of nothing — the strangeness of the idea of it. The not-nothingness of things perpetually hanging in the air — waves of light, particulate matter suspended in the air, the trajectories of avalanches of transmissions, all the stuff people can’t see but can sense anyway — and tries to push it away. He thinks about the ether. Nothing. Not-nothing. The matter in between visible objects. The space carrying everything along. Invisible. Untouchable. Imperceptible. There. 

A voice in Richard’s head begins to speak. Calm, reassuring, unambiguously delighted. Always there, trying to cheer him up. Trying to distract him until the panic twisting up his insides eases out.

_You know, the Greeks never really fully grasped what they called ether. They also called it something else. Quintessence, I think? No weight, no shape. Immeasurable, boundless. The stuff holding up the celestial bodies, everything else in the world, holding up all the molecules that make us up, making sure we don’t fall apart. It’s interesting, isn’t it? That there’s all this stuff holding us together that we can’t see. That we might never understand in this lifetime. But it’s there, anyway. We just have to trust it. I think it’s quite something. Don’t you think so, dear?_

He shakes his head. Voices are talking to him. That's a thing, now. This is so stupid.

The minute hand on the clock moves.

Richard drops his gaze back to the tea. Maybe if he drinks it all, the leaves will fall in all the right places.

“Guys,” he rasps. “Thank you, really, for this I mean, but…”

“Yeah, look, Richard. That's not gonna happen,” Dinesh interrupts.

“We're gonna keep coming back until you get your shit together, so to speak,” Gilfoyle clarifies.

“You're gonna be waiting a while,” Richard says truthfully.

“That's fine,” they both respond, simultaneously. Again.

Maybe Richard is floating in some weird zone and any minute now he can wake up. He wants this to be some floating weird zone. Desperately. He wants to step out. He wants to wake up. He wants the hammering in his chest to just stop.

This is bullshit.

 _Darling, that’s life,_ a ghost chides, in his brain.

Richard takes a sip of the tea. It’s cold now. He watches his present company shift on the floor, looking around the place, tilting their heads, exchanging knowing looks. Maybe they’re communicating telepathically. He can’t tell. Is that a thing, now? Has that been a thing of theirs?

He shakes his head again, making a serious attempt to snap out of it.

“You know what’s been in my head, like, a lot, these past few weeks? Pied Piper would not have worked out without Jared,” Dinesh suddenly says. “Seriously.”

“Yeah, we didn’t exactly have our shit together, among other things. Also, as deeply uncomfortable as this is for me to admit, Richard, you only really stopped being a complete fuckup when the two of you turned into a thing,” Gilfoyle adds.

“Yeah, true. But also, super weird, isn’t it?” Dinesh agrees.

Richard almost laughs. He shrugs instead, still focused on the tea.

“I wonder if that stupid jacket’s still there at Erlich’s place.” Dinesh says.

“Maybe the birdhouse is still there.” Gilfoyle says.

“Yeah, I think that’s where Erlich hid the snake wine.” Dinesh adds.

“Hmm, speaking of, I’m pretty sure his weird dedication to his sobriety saved the world that time your hammered ass almost fucking killed the internet, globally,” Gilfoyle says.

“Huh. Hey, Gilfoyle, what was that shit he said when got him drunk that one time?” Dinesh inquires.

"That we're good people and best friends or something."

"No, the other thing."

“Ah, that our bullying is obviously some desperate need to reclaim our grasp of order in an absurd world,” Gilfoyle quotes. “Some shit like that.”

“First of all, as if.”

“No, I kind of agree.”

Richard laughs, despite himself. He looks on at the both of them, then sharply looks away.

“You know, what I still find hard to grasp is how his weirdness never let up,” Dinesh says.

“I’m sure Richard more than enabled it,” Gilfoyle comments. He turns to Richard and adds, “after all, you did knit half the ugly holiday sweaters, that one year."

Richard drops his head and turns his face away from present company, trying to hide the laugh that sneaks up on him.

"Although I must admit, the cable-knit skulls were skillfully done," Gilfoyle continues.

"Hey, Richard, when was that again?” Dinesh asks.

“Twenty-eighteen,” he answers, trying to stifle his own laughter. “And I’m not sorry.”

 

* * *

 

2021\. A sterile room — bright, white, benign, featureless. Somehow, inexplicably, absolutely beautiful.

Richard is trying to make up for months and months of lost time.

“It was a lot like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day,” Jared says. “Aimless, mostly. Long and aimless. Long and aimless and exhausting.”

Richard stretches his legs in the cramped hospital bed, tries to sit up straighter. “Eight months of Groundhog Day,” he says. He squints at Jared, making a show of trying to picture it. “The worst.”

“Well, Bill Murray had, I think, a decade of it? Learning French, the piano, ice-sculpting,” Jared sighs, trying to make light of his own situation, as he’s wont to do. “There was this vicious spat in Hooli between two engineers who were convinced that it was either eight years or thirty-four. Not that I think it matters. The point is, it was intolerable.”

Richard shifts, reaches over to cradle the side of Jared’s face. Blue eyes like a clear sky on a temperate day. The kind of day where everything’s just right. The kind of day where nothing could go wrong.

“I couldn’t stand it, either,” he says.

Jared smiles and a warmth washes over Richard. Somehow the clatter of the hospital seems to ebb and wane, until it’s all been tuned out. They hold that moment. The world moves. Time stretches. Dust falls.

“You know, I often found myself thinking about the first time you took me to Tulsa,” Jared suddenly says. “Everything about it, really. But the school tour is… a highlight.”

“Oh,” Richard breathes.

His face turns red. Are his hands clamming up? _What’s wrong with him?_

Jared puts a hand over Richard’s, possibly as some kind of reassurance. He laughs as he asks, “Richard, are you embarrassed?”

 “No. No, no,” Richard stammers. “It’s just… uh. Me too,” he admits.

“We should do that again,” Jared teases. “You know which part.”

He bites his bottom lip suggestively, which is new. _Huh._

Now Richard is laughing. “Who are you?” He gasps, in mock horror.

But, yes: he knows which part.

2017, December.

White powder over the whole block. A pristine glow upon the sky. A chill that sneaks right into the bone, sharp and smothering. Richard’s already texted in the Uber, so it only takes a knock for his parents to open the door and yank them into a hug — him first, then Jared. He hears barking and immediately drops to his knees and locks Maple in a hug, trying to pull her away the moment she starts covering his face in licks, wagging her yellow tail, absolutely ecstatic at the sight of their new guest. They settle in and spend their first evening curled in the living room, listening to Catherine and Harold regale Jared with colorful stories about a young, precocious, timid Richard. Maple napping at Richard’s feet while Jared shares slightly disturbing stories of his own childhood. The swell of trumpets and Ella Fitzgerald’s croon filling the air.

 _I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood._ _I know I could always be good…_

Paper thin flakes falling on the other side of the window.

One morning, a few days before Christmas, Jared makes an odd request. But it’s Jared, and Richard will do anything he asks, so they sneak out early and weave their way through the whitened streets. Richard has no idea how they’ve managed to trespass right into his old high school, doesn’t ask Jared how he manages to pick through locks with ease or why he even has any hooks and pliers and tension tools handy, but somehow they’re in the middle of the gym, coats shucked off, walking along the perimeter of the space. Richard feigns nonchalance as he recalls the mostly horrible things that ever happened to him in his youth, tries to bury it all under the cover of humor. Jared matches Richard’s stories with his own, and they laugh as they unburden themselves from the weight of whatever pity, shame, or disappointment they’ve been carrying on behalf of their younger selves.

He considers the view from the bleachers — a flat expanse, old and dim, a faint light wafting in the corner, ghostlike and eerie. They sit with their knees knocking, taking in the wide empty vista.

“You know what, I take it back. What I said? I still hate this place, a little bit. Jesus, it’s petty, but I do,” Richard says, apropos of nothing.

“It’s not petty,” Jared responds. “You can’t help how you feel about some things.”

“Yeah, just. I’m sorry. We’re here because you said you wanted to imagine what my normal childhood looked like, and now I’m just thinking about that stupid time when I hid over there for hours,” Richard says, pointing to the door to the changing rooms, “because I took some asshole’s name out of a group Chem paper because he, uh. Well, didn’t bother to contribute. ”

“Strong moral principle. I don’t see what’s so wrong about that.”

“My two black eyes and broken rib would beg to differ,” Richard laughs.

Jared stands up and starts to skip down the bleachers. He holds a hand up to Richard, and they make their way down, across the space, into the changing rooms. Tiles dimmed in the dark, taking on an unearthly virescence. A row of narrow orange doors, hermetically sealed. Jared inspects the corner, traces a hand up along the cold, smooth edge.

“I can’t picture you hiding anywhere in here,” Jared says.

Richard points at a narrow broom closet. “I was small. Very small. I, uh skipped some grades?” He says quietly, looking away. “I sort of accidentally locked myself in, also.”

“I think I know the feeling. I once had a closet for a room in this one home,” Jared shares, as some sort of consolation. “There were nine of us, and I was short then, and the slightest.”

“Hah, now look at us,” Richard laughs, going for irony.

“I know,” Jared agrees, with undisguised awe.“We’ve come so far, haven’t we?”

Jared beams at Richard, and Richard figures the sarcasm flew right over his head.

He considers the faint streak of light falling over them both. The dimness of the room. The strange circumstances and series of choices that have led them to this point.

Well, look at them, indeed.

That is something.

Richard has no idea why he chooses that moment to pull Jared into a kiss, but he does, so the kissing is happening. A kiss that was genuinely, absolutely meant to be nothing more than a soft brush. Delicate, chaste, purely appreciative in the most innocent sense — nothing more. It’s absolutely not his fault that it’s suddenly taking on an aggressive turn. Absolutely not.

He feels a tug at the back of his neck. Hands sliding up his hair. A tongue slides along the roof of his mouth, and his whole body shivers.

If he’s being backed right into the lockers, the soles of his shoes squeaking into the tiles as he’s handled right into the metal, that’s not his fault either. If he’s pulling his sweater off, really it’s only because it’s suddenly gotten stuffy, and because there are hands sliding under his shirt. Maybe he’s only imagining something pressing down and distressing his femoral nerve, but really, it’s only reasonable to quell that distress by applying more pressure, like sealing them together right at that very spot, and if the oxygen’s slowly being funneled out of the room for some reason, then it is absolutely logical for him to try to maybe try to eke out the air in the form of what’s being breathed into his mouth. But really, whatever is going on, none of this is his fault, because he’d never do anything outrageous here, because he hates this place. He hears the sound of clothing flopping onto the floor. He feels the heel of a palm pressing over his groin, and the moan he makes in response is a little too obscene for this kind of environment.

_What was he thinking about?_

Never mind.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this here,” he breathes.

“We can find some other spot, if you’d like,” Jared suggests, right over his ear. “I clearly remember you mentioning something about a full school tour.”

“No, let’s not,” Richard gasps, scandalized.

Momentarily — a fraction of a fraction of a second — Richard remembers that he hates this place, or maybe really hated it once, a long long time ago. Momentarily, some feeling resurfaces in him, some vindictive feeling concerned with conquering whatever latent disquietude he might still be harboring over shit he needs to get over. Somehow, it’s manifested in turning this unexpected entanglement into a contest. Not that there are metrics, not that this is a conflict, but if it is, it's one that he’s losing, so he is making a concentrated effort to turn the tables and adamantly not lose. Especially not when he’s simultaneously trying not to crumple on the spot, slack and tense and burning and relieved and frightened and excited all at once. Especially not when his flight over fight instinct is making some attempt to kick in, because part of him wants to call it quits, drop it all right now. But somehow that part of him is conceding, because his pants have been unzipped, and there are hands all over him, and all he can do is try to quell the hammering in his heart.

Richard throws his head back and wonders if it’s just him, or he’s phasing right into the locker doors.

If he’s ever dreaded this place, or if he’s ever hated it at all, or if he’s ever wanted to come back and just stare it down until it rusts and blisters and rots away and never recovers, he can’t seem to remember, or it’s gotten so far away from him that it’s nothing, now. Just a thinning line on the yawning horizon, receding into nothing but a place from some other life.

Richard grabs Jared by his stupid handmade sweater and lets him know exactly what he thinks of this terrible, terrible idea.

When he wakes up, it’s 2024 again.

No cramped twin bed. No arm over his chest. A dream of a life that’s just passed through, in slow drips that seem to wane into vapor. Moments gone in the instant of becoming, clear and present and weighty one second, immediately floating out of reach.

 

* * *

 

 

“Dude. Was Jared sick?” Bighead suddenly asks.

“What?” Richard sputters. He tugs nervously at his cuffs as he asks, “what do you mean?”

“Natural burial is, uh. Weirdly specific?” Bighead says, with a shrug. “It’s like, I don’t know. Did you talk about it or something?”

Richard looks away. It’s late. The tall grass bends under the press of a cold breeze in the late noon. A spotted sparrow lands on a low grey slab.

“We talked about everything,” Richard says. In a way, the truth. “It just… came up. At some point,” he clarifies.

Richard watches as Bighead crouches over the tombstone and squints at the name, looks up at the sparrow and tilts his head at it. The sparrow hops over the rim, turns its head to consider the strange figure staring right at it. Bighead huffs at it, and the sparrow goes back to minding its own business.

Bighead stands back up, scratches the back of his head.

“You holding up okay, dude?” He asks. “The guys told me they were gonna ambush your place and I told them that was kinda rude but they were really mean. Like, really really mean. Big data’s given them a lot of ammo for your mom insults. They turned them into, like, your mom threats, man.”

“Oh god,” Richard responds, abruptly guilty. “Sorry about that. Yeah, Dinesh and Gilfoyle came over. They brought tea. And, uh a broom and a vacuum?”

Bighead scratches his head again. “My place is a mess excuse?” He asks.

“Yeah,” Richard sighs.

“Sorry.”

Richard shrugs. “It’s fine. It was nice,” he says.

After a beat of silence, he continues, "their place is a mess, I really don't know what they were thinking."

"Eh, they always mean well."

Richard shrugs.

“You, uh, look good though. Really. For real, really," Bighead says. "You’re doing okay, right?”

The sparrow on the tombstone flutters away. Richard’s eyes follow its path as flies higher and higher. He wonders if he could shake some answers out of the graying expanse. He looks at the clouds and tries to cast the full force of his frustration at it. The firmament remains unmoved, only moving of its own accord. He watches the wind sweep the clouds out. The sparrow vanishes into the sky.

“I don’t know,” Richard says, truthfully.

Bighead gives him a small pat on the back. "You're getting there, man," he says.

They leave just before their side of the earth angles away from the sun.

During the drive, Bighead suddenly says, “it’s funny, at first I hated Jared. Because he sort of got me fired and stuff, you know? Which was really confusing because he was so nice about it and shit. It was weird hating on nice people. Like, real weird. It made me nervous and shit.”

Richard watches the bleed of greens and concrete from the window as the car rolls into Palo Alto. He smiles and says nothing, so Bighead continues.

“I mean, when I was like, out of Pied Piper, he kinda offered me some advice and told me my app was super sexist. That was, like, our first conversation and stuff, so at the time I thought he was a total prick, and he just kinda covered it all as a fake nice thing, like a total Hooli tool. Funny how things work out, right?”

“Yeah. Funny,” Richard agrees.

“I was totally right though. About, you know. You two. I was kidding but jokes kinda need to be a little true. But, shit, I remember I called it, like, really early.”

Dots of light start to pour into the blur of the world from the window. Richard smiles, surprised at the sudden revelation that seems to lift away whatever residual gloom he’s stubbornly held on to.

 

* * *

 

Richard remembers one evening when he’d woken up from the sudden shock of a mug slipping from his hands.Another late night, as usual. Only a few weeks away from TechCrunch. 

His eyes snap open, but there’s none of the crashing sound he expects from the glass shattering. Instead, the mug’s back on his desk. For some reason there’s a blanket hovering over him, a wide field of sandy tan with spots of loose threading.

He looks up and instantly recoils right when the blanket is laid over him.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Jared stammers. “You’ve been asleep for almost an hour, now.”

“Um,” Richard replies, rather eloquently.

He looks down at the blanket and looks right up at a ghostly figure staring right at him.

 _He’s totally into you, dude, a voice taunts,_ in his head.

 _No, no, you’ve got it wrong,_  his interior voice responds, defensively. _All wrong._

 _How many people are this nice to you?_ The voice persists.  _Dude._

 _Maybe shut up,_ he thinks.

Jared pulls up a chair and sits right beside him. Richard turns away and he’s aware he’s making an obvious effort to not look Jared in the face, can practically feel a vein pulsing in his temple, knows that his eyes are popped wide in a way that looks a little insane, but if ever his present company’s noticed his obvious discomfort, he says nothing of it.

“Anything I can do to help?” Jared inquires.

Richard thinks about the dream he’s just woken up from, Jared saying the exact same thing before leaning closer. He shakes his head and snaps out of it.

Stay on topic.

“Not really,” he says, as smoothly as he can manage. “It’s just… scale,” he grits out, letting the word bear all the weight of his frustration.

“I don’t follow,” Jared answers.

Richard scratches at the table's edge, reaches over to fold his Macbook shut.

“It’s just… the success of this entire product is going to rely on economies of scale. It's only going to work on massive amounts of data. On that front alone, Nucleus has us beat. Even if our model were better, how are we supposed to compete with Hooli’s actual, ready resources?We’re bringing a knife to a gunfight, Jared,” Richard mutters, covering his head in his hands. “This is so stupid.”

“No it’s not,” Jared says, with all the certainty in the world.

“Then you’re stupid,” Richard whines, head still in his hands.

He hears a long sigh and almost jumps when he feels a hand clap on his shoulder. He breathes and prepares a list of excuses for brushing off his obvious discomfort: TechCrunch-induced nerves, averse to touching, just really tired it’s kind of late really I’m sorry, I’m sorry please stop doing that.

 _Totally into you,_ the voice taunts, again.

(It’s funny, the way memory works. The clarity of hindsight razing old doubts, bringing them out of the fog and exposing them to the light. His present self steps back from the swirl of his thoughts, as he swaps the unease he once felt for what it was. The very thing at the core of it all.  _Totally into you,_ a voice taunts.  _It's the other way around,_ he corrects.)

“One step at a time, Richard,” Jared says. “We’ll get through this.”

Richard looks up, straight into blue eyes like a glittering sea. An anchor bringing him to shore.

 _We’ll get through this,_ a voice echoes in his head.

The sound somehow launches off-course, into a distant trajectory, another memory delicately interconnected by the thin thread of a phonetic cue. Navigating through the tangle of a warped mind is tricky, confusing, and all in all, mostly trouble.

Richard files that in the back-burner for later consideration.

“We’ll get through this,” someone is saying, a few feet away from him.

There’s something else being said. Something about arrangements that he can’t quite decipher. Noise bleeding into the dense cacophony of the natural world.

He looks up and out into the white and blue and green blur of a senseless world.

“Richard? Did you hear what I just said?”

It’s another day, years and years and years and years later. They’re standing in the tall grass, under the whitened sky, looking over a confluence of rivers by the Driftless Area carving into Illinois, talking about — of all things — the business of getting rid of a rotting body.

“I know a natural burial sounds a lot like grain entrapment,” Jared continues. “Like in Witness, when Harrison Ford murders a man in a corn grain silo? I think I’m just not too keen on a coffin or cremation. It seems rather morbid.”

Richard blinks.

“You want to be thrown into the ground and have dirt poured right over your dead body?” He says, in the slow manner meant ludicrous things that have become a constant element of their typical conversations.

But anyway, this is far from typical.

“It sounds unceremonious when you out it that way.” Jared replies.

This is ridiculous.

Richard thinks about the utter madness of it all. The fact that this even needs to be discussed is utter madness. He looks at Jared, considers the way he looks at that very moment. Hair lifted up by the spring breeze, eyes wider, looking younger and more vibrant than usual.

“This is not fair,” he seethes.

None of this is fair. It really isn’t. Richard promised he’d be over it, but he really isn’t. He physically cannot.

“Darling, I know, but we’ve talked about this,” Jared responds, impossibly calm.

“Come on,” Richard nearly yells. “You know it’s not fair.” 

“We still have some time left,” Jared bargains, steady and measured.

“What if we try to stop it? We can. I know we can,” Richard says, making no effort to keep his voice from trembling.

“Richard…”

“Come on. It’s not impossible. Knife in a gunfight, remember? You and me.”

Supposedly this is the part where Jared just goes with whatever he says, even if it’s just to pacify his fits before they crest into some massive, draining panic. That’s the expected response, anyway.

“We can try. But that’s no guarantee,” Jared says, instead. Calm. Measured. Sensible, in the most fucked up way.

This is fucked up.

Richard is not going to talk about funeral arrangements like it’s some sick joke.

He really doesn’t want to yell right now. No, scratch that, he really wants to yell. Just not in front of anybody. Let alone present company. He walks away, right to the edge of the grass, gets close enough to the water that he could lean and pitch over, right into it.

“This isn’t fair!” He yells, mostly to the sky.

“Richard, please.”

“How are you calm? How are you just talking about this, like it’s nothing? Grain entrapment? Really?”

“I try not to grieve for things that are out of my hands,” Jared says, without much sound.

“You don’t deserve this,” Richard grits through his teeth.

“It happens to everybody,” Jared repeats.

Maybe he thinks if he repeats it enough, Richard will find this bullshit just a little easier to stomach.

“I could have easily ended up a complete piece of shit, you know. If you weren’t around, from the start. All of us. Beyond dispute; we were all pieces of shit. You know it’s true. So, please. Please don’t act like this is okay,” Richard begs, like it’s going to change anything at all.

Maybe it could.

Maybe. _God, wouldn’t he like to know._

Jared fixes his gaze at him, fervent, resolute, mouth agape but speechless. Like he wants to say something, but any speaking is somehow precluded by the momentum that’s assertively weighing this conversation to one side of the fulcrum.

“Why aren’t you angry?” Richard yells. "Why are you fine with this? Why the fuck have you always been fine with this?"

He doesn’t mean to rile anybody up, but has to get all of this out.

“You’re not disposable,” he continues, as assertively as he can manage, as flaky as his voice sounds.“This isn’t okay.”

“Richard, you think too highly of me,” Jared says, as if to relay some self-evident reminder. _Like he knows shit._

Richard looks straight at Jared, ready to channel the momentum that’s been carrying him through this abrupt volley of nervous grief into something else, and immediately loses steam. He considers the creases at the sides of his eyes. Some of the hair in his head graying just at the roots. Jared always looks tired. Tired but vibrant, like he’ll happily carry the weight of the world.

“I think the world of you, and that’s just about right,” Richard says, with all the certainty he can bring to bear.

Jared smiles at him, apologetic. _Nothing to say._

He turns away, fixing his gaze onto the water instead, to their warped and stretched reflections. Capillary waves fan out as the breeze presses against the surface, expanding into large creases, overlapping with smaller creases, light undulating and fluctuating over their reflections, and the water means nothing by it, the air means nothing by it, the laws of motion mean nothing by it, but their reflections look senseless, the noise in his brain sounds senseless, the figures in the water look familiar, like if time and circumstance could physically ravage a person’s entire being in ways that would manifest more aptly than lines and graying ever could.

“Sorry,” Richard says, in a flat whisper. “I didn’t mean to make this about me.”

“You know you were already all the things you give me credit for,” Jared says, in a matter-of-fact manner. “Principled. Optimistic. Brilliant. All of those things.”

Richard tries to laugh, but it sounds flat and bitter. “And here I thought you were just in it for my good looks,” he says.

“Well, that certainly helped a lot,” Jared replies, completely missing the joke.

Richard can feel his throat close. “I hate this,” he admits.

"You never know," Jared says, brightly. "Maybe we can stop it."

"I want to," Richard says, soundlessly. "I really want to."

He feels a hand grip his wrist tightly. He says nothing more.

They sit by the edge of the grass. Richard considers the senseless swirl of the vista before them, kernels of noise at the fore bleeding into a Gaussian smoothness at the back, ostensibly arbitrary, perhaps deliberately manipulated, in ways he may never truly comprehend.

Jared tells him a story about an odd life. It begins with an old apartment, a woman named Josie, and a spyglass. Nights pointing it up at the inky black expanse, humbled by the sight of a bright spot of light, its aggressive blaze made soft and delicate through time and distance. A flip of a lens transforming it all into a patch of white dots — smaller beads of light clustering into a whole. A sight from so long ago yet so novel and so foreign and breathtaking that it all still seems so vivid. The lights in the sky tempering a dark and wide abyss, the tragedies of the Greeks hanging in above him like some cosmic premonition. Years and years later, miles and miles away, the lights in the sky might as well have come down to land in Palo Alto, in the form of some strange family in a teardown shack. Dots of light in a sea of pitch-black. A light from something that’s been dead long ago, burning anyway, like a never-ending transmission. Gone but still there.

Jared presses his lips to Richard’s temple.

The wind howls, unseasonably bitter at the height of spring.

 

* * *

 

“Richard, you can’t keep living in your head,” someone is saying.

Richard blinks and looks around.

“What?” He rasps.

“I said, don’t let it get to your head,” Erlich repeats. “Loath as I am to carry the burden of your soon-to-be-previous CEO position.”

“It’s still my company,” Richard reminds him.

“Mm-hmm. Your company, under my direction,” Erlich explicates. “Maybe we can finally segment a whole R&D division dedicated to developing transporter beams.”

“Erlich…”

“Think about it. Biological data perfectly compressed and duplicated to create the perfect biological copy while simultaneously disintegrating the old. To avoid the potential clone war, as you undoubtedly already know. The next logical step in compression technology,” Erlich says, in one earnest breath.

“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” Richard says.

“That’s because I’m not.”

“Uh… You know what, why don’t you get it all out now? The other stuff you’ve been dying to pitch, I mean,” Richard sighs. “Just, whatever. Tell me. So I can shoot them down now.”

“Richard, there are literally endless ideas stewing in the back-burner right now,” Erlich says, pointing to his temple. “Some of which you’ll probably be familiar with, only new and improved, as hindsight is twenty-twenty and whatnot. Perhaps you’ll remember the predictive security integration.”

“You’re not going to pull a Minority Report.”

“I’ll concede, the old version was uninspired, and unintentionally classist,” Erlich says, defensively. “But, this new version is the superlative of its old, myopically discriminative shell of a former self. Same tech, new application. Two words: neural wetware.”

Richard frowns. “So. Terminator?”

Erlich holds his hands up in defeat.

Richard looks out through the glass walls of the office he’ll soon be clearing out. He considers the clusters of bright young things passing through, the unadorned nature of the whole of this space they’ve all built, with its verdant exteriors and austere anatomy. A lack of the ridiculous things that have become inextricably tied to all of Silicon Valley. The strangeness of seeing things exactly as they are.

“Just don’t screw up for now. No big ideas, please,” Richard says.

“Please,” Erlich dismisses. He steps around the table to look at the window, too. “So, what’s next for you? Teaching? Building your own incubator?”

“I don’t know yet,” Richard says, with some surprise at his own delight. “I legitimately don’t know.” 

 

* * *

 

 

2016\. A too-high loft bed, the sight of a white spackled ceiling, wind from a rotating fan, and the back of a hand nearly pressed against Richard's own.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” Richard whines. “I mean, it’s an unexpected pivot. I guess it’s the done thing? I just need to understand the tech better. Find new uses. This isn’t the end of it. What do you think?”

“I think it’s exciting,” Jared breathes.

“So, not a total bust, then?”

“No, absolutely not. It would be remiss of me to say that this is the best thing that could have happened, but it’s still thrilling isn’t it? Not knowing.”

“Uncertainty isn’t really a positive for me,” Richard confesses.

“Well, I believe in you.”

“You always say that,” Richard says. There’s a beat of silence, and he quickly backtracks. “Sorry. That sounded unkind. That’s not what I meant.”

Jared laughs at him, just a little. “I know.”

He shifts slightly, and Richard can feel the fabric move under them. He can feel himself getting tugged closer — a fraction of a fraction of an inch — and he flushes, intensely self-conscious.

“I was wrong,” Jared says. “Initially, I mean. I thought it was the technology that was unique. The algorithm. Now we know that other engineers can build it, too. It’s brilliant, but it’s not as special as we thought.”

Richard laughs. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re doing a very horrible job right now.”

“What I mean to say is that it’s you. You’re making all the difference. Putting people first. Making sure the platform gets in the right hands.”

“Well, I had a lot of help,” Richard whispers.

“And here I always thought I was just passing through.”

“No,” Richard says, emphatic. “Absolutely not. I couldn’t have done all this without you.”

An odd feeling comes over him. A gear shift. Nerves flustering in the middle of a free-fall. A quiet intensity. Like he can consciously feel the turn of the world right as it torques into sunlight. 

He used to laugh at the notion of diving into something new, recklessly, fervidly.

How funny and how strange.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who read this, and to those who said a lot of kind words for the previous chapters. Initially, I'd written this as an attempt to escape from some personal pain. Some of you have reached out to me on tumblr, over the course of writing this sad little story, and I shared some of that pain with you. I'd like you to know that I'm okay now.


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